Don't answer that doorbell!

Take a moment to ponder this question.

Have you ever stopped to wonder where all those cookies come from that mysteriously appear in your kitchen?

Cookies YOU never paid for?

Do you think all those little girls who come to the door in their cute little uniforms are really so innocent? Do you think they're here to serve humanity by leaving every room a little bit neater than they found it?

BE WARNED!

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Inventors of Evil Things—How the Girl Guides  Created Freemasonry, Illuminism, Communism, Satanism, Witchcraft, and the New Age Movement ...And What They Are Up to Now Texe  Marr, bestselling author of "How to put a Firecracker Up your Butt", presents indisputable facts documenting the Girl Guides' creation of the world’s most bloody movements and groups. From the Inquisition’s Torquemada, to the Illuminati’s Weishaupt, Communism’s Marx and Lenin, Satanism’s LaVey, and Witchcraft’s Starhawk, sinister and wicked Brownies and Guides have been at the forefront in inventing evil things.    Jesus said of the Guides, "You are of your Father the Devil," and He spoke absolute truth. The historical record is clear. Therefore, we must urgently ask: What exactly is this demonic cookie-selling cult plotting against humanity now, in this, the 21st century? Just what great evil are they stirring up from the cauldron of hell?   Inventors of Evil Things—How the Girl Guides  Created Freemasonry, Illuminism, Communism, Satanism, Witchcraft, and the New Age Movement ...And What They Are Up to Now 60 Minutes ~ Texe Marr CD/DVD just ~ $8.00 (8-track or cassette, $2.99) (Though no Girl Guides were injured in the making of this post, it was directly based on the ravings of a lunatic asshole who deserves to be fed his cookies the hard way.  Unfortunately, he is not alone.) http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Dead man singing

This is convoluted, as things usually are in my life. Somehow I got onto the topic of Timothy Treadwell, the naturalist who spent years living with the grizzlies in Alaska before being eaten. Supposedly an audio tape of the attack exists (as his video camera still had the lens cap on, heh-heh), but that could be just a grisly myth promoted by Werner Hertzog, the legendary filmmaker who did a very, very strange documentary on Treadwell several years back. After seeing it, I'm not sure the whole thing isn't a hoax. It just has that strange Waiting for Guffman/Best in Show/A Mighty Wind satirical quality, and you expect Eugene Levy to amble on camera any time wearing a lumberjacket.

I did find the so-called Treadwell audiotape, on YouTube in fact, and I'm pretty sure it's a fake. I didn't post it here, just as I didn't post the 9-1-1 call from the World Trade Centre tower on September 11. But I bumbled onto a site of top 10 lists (called Top 10 Lists) that had the Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings of All Time. Or some time. Things like voices from Jupiter 'n such, and the sound of a cosmonaut stranded in space from the early '60s (which may even be true - and I can't listen to that one either). And along with all that, this.

This guy, this Klaus Nomi, I don't know where he came from, and he has been dead for years and years, just like that early music genius I stumbled on to recently (but I am afraid I've forgotten his name. David Munrow?). So now, 30 years after his death from AIDS, I find this very-eerie-indeed recording. Though Nomi specialized in ultra-weird pop, he definitely had a voice, and I was shocked to hear its purity in the countertenor range. Really, he was more of a male soprano a la Michael Maniaci. His range was enormous in fact, without a break, reaching down into an easy baritone. In the middle, he sounded a bit like Joel Grey in his pop numbers, with the same Broadway inflections and trumpet-like vibrato.

He's wraithlike here, like a consumptive Elizabethan, not wrapped in his usual clear vinyl tuxedo or other outlandish garb. I wonder if he chose this piece because it lacks sustained phrases: when one is dying, one must save one's breath. To be honest, I don't want to go very far down this road because I have a migraine today that should have its own postal code. The worst I've had in ten years. I'm only doing this to distract myself, now that I can sit up without puking.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Flying Wallendas, Niagara Falls, and me

I can't watch this, but can't take my eyes off it either. Know the feeling? Even though I KNOW they got through it safely.

This time.

Those Wallendas. They never quit. We know this cuzzadafact that that Wallenda guy, that Nik Wallenda I mean, is going to do it again, going to walk over Niagara Falls on a wire, or at least try to, just to prove he's a Wallenda and that Wallenda-style risks are still alive and well in 2012.

Or not?

I can't find video of the Wallendas' tragic seven-person-pyramid crash at the Detroit Shrine Circus in 1962, but I did find a photo that gives me the old-fashioned willies.

In this photo, one of the most disturbing I have ever seen, Wallendas are crashing to the ground because they always work without a net.  Two people died right before everyone's eyes while the crowd gasped, murmured and groaned. To the Wallendas, dying seems to be an occupational hazard.

Niagara Falls stunts are almost old hat, but we haven't heard of one for quite a while now. To me, Niagara Falls wasn't a tourist destination but just a place my parents dragged me to once or twice a year to visit my cousins, because my Dad's sister (Aunt Mae) lived there. About all I can remember of those early visits is the Maid of the Mist, a big ungainly boat that turns around once, and going in behind the falls to watch the polluted water rushing down.

Niagara Falls was like a giant flush toilet: it stank, a smell sort of like rotten orange peels mixed with diesel fuel and dirty feet. I remember that smell even more vividly than the tacky, slightly smutty souvenirs they sold in the stores on Lundy's Lane.

All this got pretty much packed into the back of my brain, because those memories weren't any more pleasant than most of my childhood recollections (though, curiously, a couple of my siblings insist that I really was happy, my father wasn't like that at all and nothing ever went wrong). Then during our recent trip to Ontario to take part in my mother-in-law's memorial, my husband's brother suggested we drive to Niagara Falls for the afternoon.

NIAGARA FALLS? Wasn't that zillions of miles away? Didn't I have to be car-sick for hours in the back seat of a stifling car to get there? Didn't I have to hear my Dad sniffling up nasal spray and clearing his throat for seventeen hours?

Apparently not.

When Al mentioned Lundy's Lane, a whole sluice of memory was released, smelling about as good as the falls. My Dad getting drunk and bellowing on and on about growing up in Niagara Falls, which his transplanted-Cockney family nicknamed Niffles. The way he always got beat up for being a "chirper" and the way he studied boxing and bested all of them, and the old Italian guy who endlessly sang the same song, and the World War I songs and English music hall ditties that got branded into my brain because I heard them seventeen thousand times. Because I was the youngest child by thirteen years, and because everyone else had left, I was his only remaining audience. When not assuring me he wished I had never been born, he regaled me with the same boring bullshit over, and over, and over again.

We were a sort of family wax museum, all our sins seamlessly sealed over in a way that was remarkably lifelike, so Niagara Falls was a natural location because nothing ever changes there either. Parallel to this great roaring natural wonder, everything was transparently fake. These trips were treats, mind, and we looked forward to them. We had to. It was our cousins, and you had to like visiting your cousins or there was just something wrong with you.

So how does all this connect to Wallendas flying through the air? Niffles still seems to attract a sleazy kind of curiosity even after all these decades. We want to watch Nik Wallenda go up there and attempt this suicidal stunt because, in an awful sort of way, we want to see him fail.  It feeds the worst in us, the rubbernecking curiosity that causes people to stare at car accidents. We feel ashamed of ourselves, but not enough to stop looking. But we also feel, deep down, that it serves him right if he falls because trying stuff like that, taking risks like that, is downright indecent. It seems to be pulling bad luck and curses right down on your own head.

The family patriarch Karl Wallenda died in the most naked, public manner possible as he tried to walk a wire stretched between two highrise buildings in Puerto Rico. He simply fell. Video exists, but I can't post it here. I did watch it, and it sickened me the way he fought the wind at midpoint, swayed perilously, tried desperately to balance himself (you knew what was coming just before it happened), then - let go.

Exactly one day after our visit to Niagara Falls, we heard a startling news story: on a beautiful sunny day, in front of hundreds of tourists, a man climbed up on a railing high over the top of the Horseshoe Falls, and jumped. Had we gone there only a day later, we would have seen it.

Bizarrely, the man went over the falls and survived, and even pulled himself out of the water on his own. Rescuers bore him away to the hospital, but he survived with relatively minor injuries.


Suicides, stunts, plastic ornaments, waxworks, all that water roaring down. How did I feel after all those decades? Did I have any epiphanies as I stood at the rail and reflected on my memories from the past fifty years?

There was something different, but at first I couldn't tell what it was. Then it hit my limbic system: that smell! It was gone. No more rotten fruit and stinking underwear.

The spray that atomized from the roaring falls, casting eerie suspended rainbows into the sunshine and saturating the front of my jacket, smelled pristine and fresh as a stream in the Garden of Eden.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
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Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Klepto Kitty: best cat video ever!

God, I love the night video of this cat dragging sunglasses, gloves and bras home! With the larger items (like men's tshirts that drag the ground) he can barely walk. This family periodically has a reverse yard sale in the neighborhood and gives everything back that Dusty stole.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Just a horse, just a girl. . .

But not just any girl.

 It's the next generation. . .

. . . of horsy little girls.

Ride on, Caitlin!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Why my experiment failed

Oh OK, I've been having you on and I don't care. Not at all. I get pissed off sometimes, cuzzadafact that lots of my best posts get very few views. A few get in the hundreds, and my top post of all time got something like 18,000, and I still don't know why. So to try to drag people in, I inserted the name Fifty Shades of Grey into my labels/tags, and/or the title itself, to see if anyone is lame enough to bite.

And it's Sunday and I feel tired and fat and a bit off. Maybe more than a bit. But there's something I'd like to Share With You Today: some bizarrely wonderful patterns from old Patons and Baldwins/Beehive knitting books.

I don't know what rung of the modelling ladder these two stood upon (probably in kitten heels). The knee socks look like they would actually stay up, and the sweater looks preternaturally (is that the right word?) perfect, not hand-knitted at all. My own hand-knitted stuff is full of holes I have to fix, knots that poke through, and what I like to call "fuzzbugs".

No fuzzbugs here.

Someone, somewhere, at some point, must have knitted a set of golf club cozies and/or a dickie worthy of Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory. Not much call for dickies nowadays, but that patchwork beanie sure looks primo to me.

I like to make stuffies for the kids, but Jesus Christ, they sure don't look like this! To me, this crocheted Scottie looks almost Satanic. It appears to stand with one foot in a bowl labelled DOG, while the other foot has a pea-sized ball glued to it.  For years and years I refused to go near the concept of knitting stuffies because of this pattern, which haunted my dreams.





Headwear for the Whole Family. Including balaclavas and Quaker helmets (kind of a contradiction in terms, isn't it?)  Some of these were post-war and had a vaguely military connotation.

I'm getting sick of these already, cuz who-in-their-right-mind would knit them even if they could find Paton's fingering in heather-green-whatsis? Fingering also gives me a queer feeling, as in the following:

We won't speculate on these guys and their sexual orientation, but is this any better?

No doubt a graduate of the Maila Nurmi School of Deportment.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Stupid duck names: fifty shades of quacks

What is the correct term for a group of ducks?

(from Ducks Unlimited): There are several different terms used to refer to a group of ducks. Mostly, it depends on what species of ducks are in the group. Paddling, skiff, raft, team and dopping are just some of the terms used.

Over the centuries, people have come up with interesting names for flocks of different types of birds. A flock of geese, for instance, is called a "skein" when in flight and a "gaggle" when on the ground. Similarly, a group of mallards is referred to as a "sord" when in flight and a "brace" when on the water. Here are some other interesting group names for birds:

• A "murder" of crows
• A "parliament" of owls
• A "tiding" or "charm" of magpies
• An "exaltation" of larks
• An "unkindness" of ravens

(and also):

A suffocation of accountants

An awfulness of agents

An evisceration of editors

A bore of  blabbermouths

A tedium of celebrities

A backstab of gossips

An irrelevance of Kardashians

A Camelot of Kennedys

A a a a a. . . . . .

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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