Saturday, December 15, 2018
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Every day is Christmas: Harold Lloyd's Christmas tree
Harold Lloyd was a Christmas fanatic. He was a fanatic about a lot of things, including painting, handball, microscopy, the Shriners, and beautiful women with no tops on. But let's stick to the Christmas tree for now.
When he was a boy, growing up dirt-poor in Nebraska, they probably had something - you'd have to be pretty impoverished not to be able to cut something down in the woods, drag it home and decorate it with some paper garlands and strings of popcorn.
But once he was in the chips, Christmas took on a whole new meaning.
I sometimes get a mental image of Harold rolling around in dollar bills and throwing them up in the air, not because he was greedy (though he was apparently a lousy tipper), but because it was fun to have money at last.
Never again would the family have to skip out in the night to avoid paying rent that they didn't have.
As you can see here, some of these ornaments were absolutely huge. Most were handmade European things that remind me of Faberge eggs. Over the years he amassed an incredible 10,000 ornaments (hard to believe, but this is Harold Lloyd, folks, and he never did things by halves), most of which were kept in a vault somewhere in his huge estate, Greenacres.
This pose with a red-jacketed Harold is obviously an earlier incarnation because you can still see parts of the tree. It doesn't have that bulged-out/pregnant/I-think-I'm-going-to-explode look it took on in later years.
In fact, this tree looks really nice to me. Has a nice shape, a nice sparkle, and TONS of ornaments already. But Harold never knew when to stop.
The little girl in the red pajamas is Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne, now keeper of the Lloyd legend. Due to family circumstances, Harold was like a father to her, and it must've been fun to have a grandfather like that, even if he was hard to keep up with. This surely must have been taken in the middle of the decorating frenzy, given the appearance of the tree in the first photo.
It always strikes me that the great geniuses of the world are little boys who never grow up. They retain that mental flexibility and ability to dream and actualize those dreams without adult restraints. They also retain temperament and a degree of childishness, which Harold did. He had a hairtrigger temper by all accounts - I learned that from Kevin Brownlow's superb documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a major source of information for my research, and it was Harold's brother-in-law who said it. So I'm not just making up stories. He really did have flaws. I say this because I sometimes wonder if I somehow inadvertently pissed off someone in the Lloyd family by portraying him as less than perfect in my book. At any rate, the silence from them has been deafening. But as I've said before, Kevin Brownlow has been wonderful to me, so maybe I'd better be happy with that.
It's still possible to buy some of those 10,000 ornaments today. In fact, they're listed on eBay right now, eight ornaments for $2500.00 USD. That's uh, three hundred and. . . that's lotsa money per ornament. Eight would be about enough for my tree.
POST-POST POST: As you well know, Wikipedia is my Bible, especially when I don't feel like plodding through a dozen web sites for information which may or may not be right. It's a sad and poignant story, what happened to Harold's estate after he died in 1971. The upkeep on the gargantuan place was basically unworkable. The huge lot had to be subdivided and sold off in parcels in the '70s, but the house still sits on top of the hill in Benedict Canyon, somewhat updated from its falling-down days. It's nice to know it's still there and being looked after.
Several movies were shot at Greenacres in the '70s, including a Lylah Clare-ish, Sunset Boulevard-esque, cheesy TV movie called Death at Love House with Robert Wagner in it (Harold's close friend), but the video clips I could find were so Godawful I could not include them here. I couldn't even make a decent 3-second gif.
History after Lloyd's death
Plans for preservation and a museum
Christmas tree in 1974
Lloyd left his Benedict Canyon estate to the "benefit of the public at large" with instructions that it be used "as an educational facility and museum for research into the history of the motion picture in the United States." For a few years the home was open to public tours, but financial and legal obstacles prevented the estate from creating the motion picture museum that Lloyd had intended. Among other things, neighboring homeowners in the wealthy community were opposed to the creation of a museum hosting parties and attracting busloads of tourists.
In October 1972, the Los Angeles Times visited the property and noted that it had "the feel of Sunset Boulevard," bringing to mind the line spoken by the young writer when he first visits Norma Desmond's home: "It was the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s." The house appeared to visitors in the 1970s to be frozen in time at 1929. One writer noted that nothing had been moved or replaced, changed, or modernized, from the books in the library to the appliances in the kitchen and the fixtures in the bathrooms.
Noted columnist Jack Smith visited the estate in 1973 and wrote that "time stood still", as Lloyd's clothes still hung in his closet, and the master bedroom and living room "looked like a set for a movie of the 1930s." A Renaissance tapestry presented to Lloyd as a housewarming gift by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was still hanging in the hallway.
The house also had Lloyd's permanent Christmas tree loaded with ornaments at the end of a long sitting room. Jack Smith described the tree as follows:
"At the end of the room, dominating it like some great Athena in a Greek temple, stood the most fantastic Christmas tree I had ever seen. It reached the ceiling, a great, bulbous mass of colored glass baubles, some of them as big as pumpkins, clustered together like gaudy jewels in some monstrous piece of costume jewelry."
POST-POST: I just thought of something else. As usual! Somewhere, I know not where, I read in my research that there was a TV special called Citizen Lloyd which aired shortly after Harold's death. There was scant information about this, but I can't help but see the title as an allusion to Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the great echoing mausoleum inhabited by Charles Foster Kane. Parallels have also been drawn to Sunset Boulevard with its algae-choked swimming pool and demented German manservant with the duelling scar.
Though Harold never employed Eric von Stroheim to look after the place, there is an eerieness to all this. Perhaps it's Stroheim's ghost that haunts Greenacres. I know Annette Lloyd got to tour the place at some point, and I never will, though Death at Love House gave me a rather macabre glimpse of it. It is, indeed, frozen in time, the furniture threadbare, the swimming pools brimming with scum.
A few years from now, I have a feeling "someone" will make a movie about Harold Lloyd, and it will have all my ideas in it. There are enough copies of The Glass Character circulating, all of which seemed to fall into the Grand Canyon without an echo.
But I wonder what happened to that TV special, if someone still has a tape of it moldering in their basement and will some day decide to put it on YouTube.
Stranger things have happened. But not much.
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Monday, December 10, 2018
Sunday, December 9, 2018
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Victorian Christmas Greetings: passing strange
This is a bit of a holdover from last year, but worth repeating. Though it didn't work perfectly, I DID find a way to gif them even if they were wildly different shapes. The strangeness just gets stranger: dead frogs, wet ghosts that look like sheep dogs, rats riding lobsters, dead bluebirds. . . and so on. It runs very fast at one point, but you can still see the festive beetroot and children terrorized by giant dragonflies. NOEL!
Best horse trick ever!
This is just indescribably delightful, and I particularly like the blanket. I've seen horses do this with stuffed animals and balloons (swing them around and around), so it IS something horses do, but it still looks impressive.
Blueberry Delight!
A compressed gif version of one of those cool Internet cooking things. No sound, so please feel free to hum along. Some of these things are more fun to watch than to make.
Friday, December 7, 2018
Lisa Laflamme: wrinkle cream trumps news every time!
Of course this is ludicrous, but many people are still of the "I saw it on the internet, therefore it must be true" persuasion. I have seen no evidence anywhere that Lisa Laflamme is quitting broadcasting, for ANY reason. I also wonder how these idiots get away with using her name, but maybe the folks at CTV consider it's small potatoes and not worth a lawsuit. Still seems immoral to me.
Lisa LaFlamme Announces She Is Leaving CTV
(ET, Thursday, December 6, 2018) - Lisa says she is retiring to spend more time with her family, but it turns out she has other plans in mind!
Lisa LaFlamme, Canada’s legendary newscaster, announced that she will soon be retiring. After spending more than twenty years as a news anchor, Lisa felt a need to make a change in her life. Namely, she decided to leave newscasting and fully focus on her skincare line called Nova Essence Cream.
Four years ago when Lisa turned fifty, she decided to get involved with the skincare industry. Her aim was to realize her lifelong dream of owning her own skincare line. Even though she described the process of discovering the perfect anti-aging formula as a demanding one, her company eventually managed to find it.
Precisely because of that discovery and the ever-increasing success of her company, Lisa though that now is the right time to completely devote herself to Nova Essence Cream. To say that she made the right decision would be an understatement.
Lisa with friends and colleagues celebrating the launch of her Nova Essence Cream
When asked about why she decided to invest in anti-aging products, Lisa said that she had enough of watching women get tricked into buying fake anti-aging creams. She also stated that it is sad that most of the products on the market today do not work at all. That is why she felt a need to create a product that will genuinely rejuvenate the skin.
When her Nova Essence Cream was launched, it only took 30 minutes for her online beauty store to completely sell out. Lisa even admitted that the level of support she is receiving from her loving Canadians has brought tears to her eyes.
"What can I say? I am truly lost for words. I decided to follow my dreams and look where I am at now. It is hard to wrap my head around it. I am so incredibly grateful for the support." - Lisa LaFlamme
However, it is the community of plastic surgeons that took the biggest blow by Lisa’s new anti-aging product. Demand for their services started rapidly decreasing. Here is what she had to say about that:
"Of course, they are all mad. I don’t blame them, but I also don’t feel sorry for them. They have tricked too many women into believing that plastic surgery is the only solution for them. Getting a Botox injection or a facelift is not exactly cheap. I will tell you right now, that’s why they are mad. Nova Essence Cream is far more affordable and a less aggressive method. Women started canceling their appointments and wanting their money back."
How does it work?
LaFlamme says that the ingredients used in Nova Essence Cream all serve a specific purpose. Vitamin C, for example, works wonders for wrinkles and can be found in most products aimed towards eliminating them. Argireline is a peptide used to relax facial muscles and prevent fine lines from emerging. Also, there is Retinol. Studies from recent years show that Retinol truly does an amazing job of minimizing fine lines and pores.
Lisa also points out that not a single ingredient used in her anti-aging cream harms the skin in any way. Her aim was to create a product based only on natural ingredients which have proven to work wonders for skin rejuvenation.
Countless aging celebs admit they avoided surgery and look 10 years younger using Nova Essence Cream.
"The advances LaFlamme has made in the anti-aging skincare industry are remarkable. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t had the chance to try it out for myself. I knew LaFlamme Denis was aging well but thought it was her genetics. After using Nova Essence Cream for two weeks I was already looking years younger." - Jennifer Valentyne, 50
"I refuse to wear a lot of makeup and thanks to Nova Essence Cream I don’t need to. My skin has never looked better and it looks younger than it did 10 years ago. I love waking up knowing I don’t need to bother trying to cover up my skin." - Jeanne Beker, 66
"I noticed that my skin was looking tired. It was dull and starting to lose its elasticity. LaFlamme gave me a sample of Nova Essence Cream and the product is a miracle worker. It only took a few days for my skin to be taut, smooth and glowing again just like it was in my 20’s." - Liza Fromer, 48
"I thought there was no way to hide my age until LaFlamme let me try Nova Essence Cream. I had resigned myself to the fact that it was only downhill from here, but with Nova Essence Cream that isn’t the way. Every night that I use Nova Essence Cream I wake up looking younger and more radiant. I can’t believe it." - Tracy Moore, 43
"It’s hard to believe but all my wrinkles have vanished! They have completely disappeared. I used to have lines around my mouth, eyes and forehead. But after a month of using Nova Essence Cream my skin is completely smooth without a wrinkle in sight." - Dina Pugliese, 43
TRY IT FOR YOURSELF
While Nova Essence Cream is selling out around the world, LaFlamme didn’t want our readers to miss out on experiencing the benefits of Nova Essence Cream for themselves.
LaFlamme is offering our lucky readers the chance to try Nova Essence Cream for FREE!
There’s no need to rush out to the shops or wait in line. You can order your free sample of the serum right now from the comfort of your own home. The only thing you’ll need to pay for is the discounted shipping rate, which is less than $6!
If you want to remove your wrinkles and get that youthful glow back into your complexion, make sure you use Nova Essence Cream every day.
Thursday, December 6, 2018
The spirit of Christmas, passed
Sweet, and a little heartbreaking. Two of my four grandkids are young women now, and the other two are racing each other towards puberty. Sad? I don't know, I guess it's just "real", and that's better than fake, isn't it? Merry Christmas, kids.
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Monday, December 3, 2018
Santa Claus is comin' to town: Shannon's star turn!
From last year's Xmas singalong at CTV News Vancouver. I've edited and blown up Shannon's part. Hope they do another one this year!
And here's a special bonus gif from 2016 (Twelve Days of Christmas - she sang "ten frozen salt trucks" or something like that - "with free ice!".
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Friday, November 30, 2018
Harold Lloyd: together again!
Somehow or other, I know not how, Harold is back in my life again. A year ago, I was in so much pain from the failure of my novel (something I poured my heart and soul into for five years) that I turned my back on him. I had to. I just wasn't able to go on.
The Glass Character: a celebration of Harold Lloyd
But I kept my Facebook fan page up (which originally was an "ad" for the novel), and just in the last little while, I got some views. Not many, just a small handful, but some, and better than the zero I got before! It had been a full year since I had updated the thing, but now that I have broken the seal, I think I will go on with it. Click on the pink link above to see it.
I have literally thousands of photos of Harold saved, made hundreds of original gifs, and wrote well over 200 blog posts. I like to think the extremity of this (he went overboard in everything he did) would make Harold happy. It's starting to make me at least modestly happy again, though I do wish something would have happened with the novel. I still have this kind of sad hope it will be made into a movie, but every inquiry I make lands with a resounding THUD. I still don't know what happened with Rich Correll, a close friend of Harold's who read excerpts from my novel before it was published and actually phoned me to express his interest, then for no discernable reason cut me off completely and stopped returning my emails and calls. I think Annette Lloyd may have run interference here (a long story, which I won't tell now. She is a Tea Party Republican and supports Trump.)
Searching for Rich Correll
The link is to a very old post written in my awkward early-blog format, and is long and sort of melancholy, but at least, like most things in my life, it is real. I cannot believe how long ago all this started, going on ten years! The way I see it now: I have all this material, and you (whoever you are. . . please be kind) haven't seen it in years, so stay tuned for some recycling. Hey, if I don't remember seeing it before, why would you?
Moose vs. World: MOOSE WINS!
This somehow did make me feel better. The moose just thrashes this thing. There's no contest. Not much information on the animal either, or what it is doing in someone's yard. Though all white animals are described as "albino", the dark eyes on this moose (albino eyes are always red) indicate a leucistic animal - I've dealt with this phenomenon before in other posts (see below). I don't often re-post things, but I like this one, it was a lot of work and got the usual 8 views, and it somehow seems relevant on a Friday morning.
If I had an alligator
If I had an alligator, which I'm not likely to do in the near future, I'd want it to look like this.
When you see something white which is normally some other colour, you automatically think "albino". But no! My research tells me these are leucistic alligators, which means they have blue eyes (and the rest of them is ivory, not pure white). Big difference.
Leucistics are rare - I keep finding different stats on this, but one source said there are "only 12 of them in the world". I don't get this. Have they mucked and gumbooted through all the swamps of Louisiana in search of these "swamp ghosts"? Who knows how many are lurking under rotten logs, waiting to attack? The logic is that something like this would stand out like neon and wouldn't survive a predator's attack. But wouldn't an alligator be pretty handy at self-defense? What natural enemies does it have? It has survived for hundreds of millions of years without having to evolve at all. So does it matter if a handful of them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy?
Maybe it would. A white alligator hide might make tasty material for a Fendi bag. One of those purses that costs as much as the down payment on a car.
These guys are frightening, ugly and beautiful at the same time. While looking for appropriate images to make an animation (above), I found some beauties. Or uglies.
The blue eyes seem to peer at us with some kind of expression, but they don't. This creature's brain has just one setting: FOOD. (Well, two, but the other one isn't turned on all the time.) It looks at you as if you were food, which you are. If you have a pulse, if you have warm blood - or cold blood - you're food. Do we have some primeval memory of being eaten alive by some prehistoric version of this thing? Imagine how big they were back then, given that everything was on a ridiculous scale.
This one creeps me out majorly. It's either jumping up in the air in a ballet-leap, or underwater. How would anyone get such a shot without being eaten?
Don't ever think it's smiling. It's not smiling. It is jaws on legs. It is hissing and death-roll, and then, digestion.
These three look almost poetical, except they're not. Once more I doubt the "only 12 in the world" statistic. Who runs around in the forest trying to find these? There must be more of them. Here's an extra one just lying around, basking on someone's dock.
My brothers had an old stuffed alligator (crocodile?) with cotton batting in it (the cotton batting spewing out of its stomach and having to be shoved back in). It was a real alligator, or it had been, the skin tanned like leather. I never knew where it came from. The boys played Tarzan with it, and claimed that if you turned the alligator (or crocodile) over on its back and rubbed its tummy, it would relax and become extremely docile. This is a legend along the lines of taming a bird by putting salt on its tail.
So the swamp ghost, the White Bite, the leucistic Fendi bag of Louisiana isn't a myth. Its only real enemy is humankind, which means it will probably be wiped out in short order, along with everything else.
That is the meanest face I have ever seen.
POST-SCRIPT. I never knew what I was getting into when I looked up alligator bags. I assumed they might top out at, say, $10,000.00.
But no. I found this in a post about The Five Most Expensive Purses In The World:
The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag – $261,000
Next on our list is the The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag for a little more than a quarter of a million. It’s limited edition and it’s incrusted with 334 diamonds, white gold hardware and white alligator skin. And that’s only №4!
So the swamp ghost, the White Bite, the leucistic Fendi bag of Louisiana isn't a myth. Its only real enemy is humankind, which means it will probably be wiped out in short order, along with everything else.
That is the meanest face I have ever seen.
POST-SCRIPT. I never knew what I was getting into when I looked up alligator bags. I assumed they might top out at, say, $10,000.00.
But no. I found this in a post about The Five Most Expensive Purses In The World:
The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag – $261,000
Next on our list is the The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag for a little more than a quarter of a million. It’s limited edition and it’s incrusted with 334 diamonds, white gold hardware and white alligator skin. And that’s only №4!
The description does not specify if this is from an authentic leucistic alligator, or just some old garden variety Wally Gator from a golf course in Florida who had a dye job. One would think the scarcity of the variety would preclude making it into bags, even for a quarter of a million dollars. Might it be that hideous vinyl stuff we had in the '60s, which would get so hot and melty in the sun?
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