The Glass Character: August 2014

Sunday, August 31, 2014

IT'S A LIE!: The plump juicy raisin scam

All right.

I've already spent too long at the computer, and have "keyboard finger", in which my arthritically-swollen right ring finger twinges like a toothache every time I hit a key. This finger has such a major swelling in the knuckle - the one nearest the nail - that it pushes the end of my finger inward, almost sideways. It's permanent, i. e. nothing that will ever go down. And all my other fingers are following suit.

But in spite of that, I have something I've wanted to say for a long time, and now I must say it.

You know Kellogg's Raisin Bran with their cute little ads? For years now, they've been talking about "plump juicy raisins", and no one is saying a thing about it! I can't even find a rant on Google. In fact, if I go on Images, I get mostly decorative pictures of raisins in bowls, presumably looking Plump and Juicy.

SINCE WHEN IS A RAISIN PLUMP?? They are brown, sometimes even black, deeply wrinkled (worse than pruny, since the new pitted prunes are more flat than wrinkled), and dessicated-looking. That brings me to JUICY. Try to extricate an atom of juice from a raisin. Just try it!

Advertising Mascots - Objects

California Raisins - In 1987, the advertising world was taken by surprise with the popularity of a group of animated singing raisins who pushed the goodness of sweet, juicy California raisins.

And yet, here is a snippet of the copy describing the nightmarish California Raisins. And yes, there's that word again: JUICY. A juicy raisin!

Doesn't anybody THINK any more?

Why does everyone accept this "plump, juicy raisins" crap without question? The same reason they accept a lot of other things. Huh? Duhhh? WHY aren't they plump and juicy? They're raisins, aren't they?

Oh God. I hate the human race.

I hate Raisin Bran and their goddamn ads, their "the rai-sunniest brand under the sun!', implying, nay, ADMITTING these things have been baking under the scorching sun in Fresno. Baking until they are dessicated, meaning DRY, NOT JUICY. "Plump" is even more mind-boggling, like saying Kate Moss is plump. Another ad had something like, "Plump goes east, Juicy goes west. . . "

These things, hard, dry, wrinkled, brown or black, often with teeth-jarring unpleasant grit in them that you can't get rid of, are meant to be a (heavily sugar-coated) chewy relief from the crumbly disaster that is bran flakes. We have a problem with bran flakes, All-Bran, bran muffins,and all other bran-containing products. We all know what they are designed to do, and not only that, THEY LOOK THE SAME WAY GOING IN AS THEY DO COMING OUT. They look pre-digested, processed, and spewed out.

Bran muffins might as well be meadow muffins, as far as I am concerned. They look like something a cowboy would fnd along the trail. The only thing in this world more turd-like is the prune, and NO ONE talks about "plump, juicy" prunes, do they? That is because they are a DRIED fruit, not a FRESH fruit. A DRIED fruit has almost all of its moisture removed, which is why it wrinkles up like that!

Someone should slap the Kellogg's ad executives upside the head, but no one will, because by now, the public seems to AGREE that raisins are "plump" and "juicy". Most of the Google images I found, depicting dry, wrinkly, dessicated raisins, were under the heading "plump and juicy!". Big Brother (or should I say Big Bran) has triumphed once again.

(P. S.: there is only ONE way a raisin can be "juicy", and that is from saliva. Let's not go there, shall we?)

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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A festival of GIFS from the 1950s: "Look! Up in the sky!"

Full marks if you can guess where this came from. I stumbled upon it during my late-night gif-image crawl. Looked like it might lend itself to some experimentation.

I don't have the capacity to do too much here. In fact, it's rare I that see any gifs that have real technical merit, and most are only one or two jerky seconds. (Ahem.) This is the slow-mo version, making me wonder if the animator somehow transferred actual writing to the screen. Well, they must have! I know almost nothing about animation and have to limit myself to 15 seconds max.

This backwards version is also interesting, as the title eats itself. It seems a bit jerky, and faster than you would think at "slow" speed, but it's probably only registering a few frames per second.

All right, this is the last one, at "normal" speed, but it plays very fast. Reminds me of someone sucking up a wet piece of spaghetti.

For some reason I love these. They remind me of the old "fill-ums" we saw in the basement of McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario when I was in Grade 3. These "fill-ums", though paralytically dull (hygiene, geography, National Film Board stuff) were a nice break from classes that were even more paralytically dull.

I like this, too, a sort of reverse countdown. Countdowns remind me of the astronauts, of course. Gus Grissom and the like. There are a lot of phony countdown headers on YouTube, and you can tell they are phony because they go down to 1, which a real header NEVER does (don't know why). This is from some Paramount thing, and once I slow it down you will be able to see the details.

I think I see "SMPTE UNIVERSAL LEADER" before the countdown. The top one is the hardest, because the brain will more quickly recognize a real word and its meaning. I have no idea what the captions mean, some sort of arcane code. Is it a real header or "leader"? Is it really from Universal Studios, or does this mean it's a sort of generic leader? Now that I look at it again, yes, I think so, though SMPTE makes no sense at all.

There is a reason why it was effortless for me to memorize High Flight for school. I already knew it. Anyone who had ever stayed up past 11:00 p.m. knew it. For reasons which are now completely incomprehensible, many TV channels used it as a signoff before the long "boooooooooop" that ran all night and used to scare the hell out of me. Most things scared the hell out of me then.

This is, in part, an experiment to see how many 15-second gifs I can run in one post. I want to see if the whole thing crashes or what. The opening of The Adventures of Superman also scared the hell out of me. It was intense. Another incomprehensible thing is how George Reeves ever ended up getting the part - a paunchy, not-very-good-looking middle-aged man who couldn't act. Later, he either committed suicide or was murdered by the mob, like Bob Crane who was rumored to have made soft-core porn films in his basement. Bob Crane was better-looking, however.

There were a couple of other things about the intro that scared me. The way Clark Kent morphed into Superman was scary. In this case it's reversed and in slo-mo, so it appears that Superman is morphing into Clark Kent (who, as we all know, was partially inspired by Harold Lloyd. Though how anyone can be "partially inspired" is anyone's guess.)

I was maybe three or four, five tops, when this show would come on, and it was already in syndication. My brother had a Superman costume that he'd put on, and he would lie along the back of the sofa and go "Pssssshhhhhhhhhhhh!" I didn't know it was an American flag flapping behind Superman, in fact I didn't know what the hell it was. The announcer, who turned out to be Bill Kennedy, a B-picture actor and host of a long-running Detroit movie program, had a note of hysteria in his voice that just mounted: "Superman. SU-perman. YES, it's SUUU-per-mannnnn!" Last night when I played the clip over and over again, looking at the menacing flag flapping around, I was reminded of Nazi Germany: "Is vee not zee Super Race? Super Duper Super Race!"

I think this housewife has had too much coffee. This was a demo of the new television technology: the remote control! It had a cord on it, which is carefully hidden beneath her wrist. I converted a faded color print into b & w for effect, though the announcer, who had the strongest Bronx accent I have ever heard, kept talking about "culluh teck-NAHHH-la-gee".

Very early Disney, in which Walt himself does Mickey's voice. This was so freaky, I had to see what it looked like slowed down.

Good night, all.

(Special Bonus gif. You thought there wouldn't be a Special Bonus Gif? There are literally thousands of snippets on YouTube of completely unknown provenance. I mean: where do people GET all this stuff, old ads, old TV shows and cartoons, and even TV station signoffs from 70 years ago? This one is for WABD, New York's Window on the W(blkphtdbt). WABD was on the Dumont Television Network, which for some reason reminds me of Milton Berle, whom I never liked. I was two months old at the time. Dumont bit the dust a long time ago, and back in the 1940s its logo was mighty strange, quavering and flashing, with Lady Liberty's torch cut off at the top. No one called it TV then, and it was common to refer to viewing as "looking at television".)

Order The Glass Character from:

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Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

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Resurrection

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Harold Lloyd Sneezing

Barred or Bard? The eloquent owl

This is the closest to what I heard in my back yard last night. I'll have my ears peeled for a return visit. (I never knew owls could produce such volume!)

Friday, August 29, 2014

Rudy, Harold, book and bird

The perfect frame for my Rudolph Valentino vintage postcard from Kevin Brownlow turned out to be no frame at all - or almost - one of those clear lucite things where the photo seems to be hanging in mid-air. He stares morosely at Harold, who takes up a special corner of my desk, and stands guard in front of an artfully-carelessly-arranged stack of The Glass Character, placed there so somebody out there in the stratosphere might want to buy it.

The bird is just a little ceramic thing. I like little ceramic things. I have tiny turtles standing on pieces of coral, a magnificent gecko from Mexico, and - gasp - a Blue Mountain pottery cougar!

Order The Glass Character from:

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Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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It must have been owls

This was an odd day, an odd week, and sometimes considerably worse than odd. You see, after my last routine mammogram, I got the dreaded "call back". They wanted to take a more detailed mammogram, along with an ultrasound. Fine, I thought, except these retakes generally meant that they "found something", and that couldn't be good. So I went through it all again, they squeezed and kneaded and poked and pressed, I got all covered with KY Jelly or whatever-it-is they use to lubricate your skin while they look underneath it.

They concentrated on my left breast, where they seemed to think the "problem" was. By the time they got done, I knew how a waffle must feel while it is being baked. Or at least, my left breast did. I could practically see the grid-marks.

A few days went by. I was prepared to let it go, assuming everything was fine, when I got another call back. I was supposed to see my doc so she could "go over" the results of the second mammogram.

Go over.

Go over? What was this about? I was expecting either nothing (the usual response to a normal test), or a call saying "your test is negative," or something like that. But this.

So I tried to keep my head out of it all week, and I was more-or-less fine until last night, when for the first time in a while I couldn't sleep. It was as if an icicle were slowly turning in the centre of my abdomen. All night.

Sometimes I think I want to lay it down, just give up, because, after all, I have achieved very few of my dreams, in spite of what often seems like mammoth (futile) effort. Then when something like this comes up, when I feel the hot breath of mortality blasting down my neck, I hear some voice in my head, some idiot but triumphant, desperate, ridiculously valiant and probably absurd voice shouting out loud:

"I want to live!"

It was like a pendulum, see, between the nice, logical "Ah, nothing's the matter, it never is, statistics are all in your favour, callbacks are common," etc. etc. (no family history, everyone lives to be over 90, etc.) and a violent swing in the other direction, a silent totting up of all the victims, people I had known, loved, or even just heard about, who had either survived breast cancer after a long and horrendous ordeal, or hadn't survived at all. I began to wonder if the "thing" that rides around with me, beside me I mean, always clamped to my peripheral vision, would suddenly rear up in front of me and make it impossible to take another step.

In the doctor's little room today, you know, the little room they tell you about on Seinfeld, while waiting for the doctor, I had to do deep breathing, deep slow breathing to try to relax the knot of primal terror in my belly. The doctor comes in. How are you? Fine. Oh God. The doctor sits down at the computer. So what are we doing today? MY GOD SHE DOESN'T KNOW?? No, she has been away from the office for a week and has no idea why I have come in today. This means that no one sitting in this room has any idea what it says on my report.

So she blinks and flips and scrolls and "hmmmmms", like she always does, and asks me the usual incredulous questions. So what happened when they examined you? What did they say? It says here they saw a bruise. Did they see a bruise? Yes, I had some sort of little bruise - I don't know where it came from - Oh, I see. It must have been in the spot, see here - look - where they thought you might have a cyst. Well, yes, it was. They put a sticker on it. A what? A sticker, so the ultrasound person could - Oh.

You had a bruise, Margaret, a small one that mimicked some little probably-harmless cyst, though in six months you will have to go through all the testing again in case. In case what?

It's late at night, and I sit here tired, having dodged a certain bullet, or gotten out of Dodge, or whatever it is. Strangely, a few minutes ago I heard a ghostly trilling, as if boys were hooting at each other over long distances, but after a while I realized it must have been owls. They were as resonant and loud as if they were right outside my window, and with all that thick bush out there, just a stone's throw away, perhaps they were. They might have been right in my own back yard.

Post-script. Yes, it was owls! The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology site has helped me identify many a species through sound alone. In this case, the calls of various common owls allowed me to compare, and quickly make a match. Looks like these were barred owls, and they were very close to the house, maybe even in the back yard. We have huge rich cedars out there, so it makes sense. One row of houses in back of us, and we're in dense bush. But if these were birds, I could not believe the volume! These things fairly boomed. The sound moved around in a bizarre way, too. I kept thinking, that has to be kids making ape noises, but the sounds simply weren't human. These birds make a hell of a racket! They have a lot of different calls too, some of them sort of trilling (chilling). Since their territory is the Pacific Northwest, I think we're close enough (though they resemble the rare spotted owl in plumage - but not in voice). I couldn't see anything out there, but I'll be vigilant from now on, that is, until colder weather necessitates keeping my office window shut. This page has a rich variety of sample calls. Listen to these guys, you'll be totally spooked out!

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id2A8yC_JJY

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Sex for a buck?

This-here vintage ad for a marriage manual, a classic of enlightenment and orgasmic edification, is going to require a little translation. I PROMISE you I am not adding anything or taking anything away, though deciphering the bleary grey letters may prove to be a challenge.

Will Their Dream Come True, or will Sex Ignorance Mar their Happiness

Thousands of marriages end in misery and divorce because so many married people are ignorant of the Art of Love. Is your marriage on the brink of ruin? Do you search for the joy of a perfect union? Now YOU can change despair into heavenly happiness -

if you know the secrets of the intimate physical contacts of marriage.

Dr. Marie Stopes, in the preface to her world-famous book, said, "In my own marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex ignorance that I felt that knowledge gained at such a price should be placed at the service of humanity." This volume, "Married Love", courageously fulfills this noble purpose.

Editor's note. I didn't think they were even going to use the word "sex", what with all those references to the Art of Love, "perfect union" and "intimate physical contacts". This Marie Stopes is painted as a sort of Albert Schweitzer or Madame Curie of the fuck-book set, selflessly sharing all the hot gyrations she learned (somewhere, certainly not in her marriage) with mankind.

The thing is, these books use such remote, stilted, even clinical language that it's hard to even fit it together with the sweaty realities of sexuality, the squeezes and groans, the slippery. . . oh never mind, let's go on.

Partial Contents

The practice of restraint to please the wife.

Surest way to prepare wife for union.

The marital rights of the husband.

What the wife must do to bring her husband's physical desires

in harmony with her own.

Regulation of physical marital relations.

Sleeplessness from unsatisfied desires.

Nervousness due to unsatisfied desires.

Charts showing periodicity of natural desire in women.

The essential factors for the act of union.

Greatest physical delights in marital union.

How some women drive their husbands to prostitutes.

Natural desire for physical union.

Joys of the honeymoon.

Ignorance of the bride and unwise actions of the groom.

The man who has relations with prostitutes before marriage.

Causes for unhappiness in marriage.

Frequency of marital relations.

Stimulation of physical desires.

The problem of the strong-sexed husband and the

weak-sexed wife.

Positions.

Physical relations during pregnancy.

Problems of childless unions.

All this makes me long to get my hands on a copy of this thing, but I am sure it has gone out of print by now. Also, this looks suspiciously like one of those ads in the back of a comic book. Good grief, imagine exposing our innocent youth to such a thing! "Joys of the Honeymoon"? What sort of filth is this? And prostitutes are mentioned not once, but twice. When you think about it, however, if virginity is assumed for both "bride" and "groom", then who the hell is going to know anything about this at all? It will be like the poor bloke who kept shoving himself into his wife's belly button and wondering why he couldn't get her pregnant.

With remarkable frankness, and in simple, understandable language, Dr. Stopes explains the intimate and important details of wedded life. Point by point, and just as plainly as she would tell you in private confidence, Dr. Stopes takes up each of the many troublesome factors in marriage. She makes clear just what is to be done to insure contentment and happiness. She writes directly, forcefully, concretely, explaining step by step every procedure in proper sex relations.

1,000,000 COPIES SOLD

This whole thing reminds me of that old vaudeville routine, "Niagara Falls! Slowly I turn. Step by step. . . inch by inch. . . " Though this may sound like instructions for building a birdhouse, it's actually a guide to ecstasy and spasmodic, flailing pleasure for both Bride and Groom. It's just that they had to use this sort of clunky, unsexy language to leach out every trace of erotic content. "Point by point", "step by step", "directly, forcefully, concretely": this sounds like something from some sort of 1950s home repair manual. But my favorite is the last line: "explaining step by step every procedure in proper sex relations." If these proper procedures had been followed to the letter, the whole human race would have died off by now.

Can't read this worth a darn, but it seems to be saying there was some sort of "ban" on this obviously filthy, salacious material and that now it has been lifted. Could this be a ploy to get people interested in this smut? The federal judge, who looks like Andy Hardy's dad, is obviously reading the back cover with great interest. I am also intrigued that to get this book, you have to send your 98 cents to the American Biological Society on East 34th Street in New York. I wonder what it looked like.

(P. S. That picture of the book - at least I think it's the book - the spine of it, I mean - at first I thought it was a spray can - then I wondered what would be IN that can. This was long before the days of Reddi-Whip.)

Order The Glass Character from:

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Vanishing point: The Wrigley Zoo

Clap hands, one, two
Let's take a trip to the Wrigley Zoo
Chitter, chatter, yakety-yak
When you talk to the animals they talk back.

We'll talk to Bobby Bear today,
Let's hear what Bobby has to say:
If you ask me there's nothing wrong
With eating honey all day long
But that's not how my mother feels
She says I must eat healthy meals.
And for a treat, she gives me some
Delicious Wrigley Spearmint gum
It helps to keep teeth clean and bright
And never spoils my appetite.

I found this on one of those message boards, the kind with a lot of pointless stuff on it. It's not the first time I've seen it, but it's the first time in 50-some years. I love old TV ads, watch them on YouTube all the time, even buy DVD sets of them that my granddaughter Caitlin avidly watches with me. I had this buried memory - repressed memory or something, except it wasn't quite repressed. It was about a series of television ads from the early '60s for Wrigley's gum, and it featured the "Wrigley Zoo", with several different animals featured. For literally years I couldn't find out anything about this. I mean, there was nothing. In near-despair, I went on YouTube and asked about it in the comments, and a number of people said, "Yes, oh yes, I DO remember that ad! Whatever happened to it?" So I knew I wasn't completely crazy. But there's no trace of these ads on YouTube anywhere, though I do hold out hope.

Someone remembers this lyric, God knows who, so the rest of it must be out there somewhere.

I'm working up to something here (so "bear" with me). Of the many strange things I discovered while searching/researching Harold Lloyd's life for my novel The Glass Character, this was the strangest. It was a site, a very plain one with no identifying marks on it, old-fashioned and rather primitive in setup, a brown-paper Blogger site like mine. The title of it was Psychic Bridging, and it was mighty strange stuff. Now I wish I had copied and pasted it and kept it somewhere, because my memories are so strange I don't know if I can trust them. It was all about a form of time travel where you don't even leave your armchair: like remote viewing, you can stay in the here and now, yet see things from the past and the future. How? Hell if I know.

The guy who wrote all this was named Paul Simon - "not Paul Simon," he assured us, "Paul SIMON." That name led me to a YouTube video he supposedly made, so poorly lit and shot that it was hard to understand. Also very long and monotonous.

The site was extremely garbled. It talked about spirits being trapped in cell phones and other electronic devices, a theory I have never heard before or since. But it mentioned Harold. It mentioned Harold as being somehow involved in psychic bridging, which I gather was being used experimentally by the government during the Cold War. Or whatever.

This is beginning to sound like an episode of Weird or What?, but I'll continue. I remember fragments only - this was six or seven years ago, and the web site soon vanished without a trace. I can't even google psychic bridging now because NOTHING comes up. Google toothpaste sandwich or goldfish tennis shoes, and you will likely get something, but not this. As I said, it mentioned Harold. It said that "the actor Harold Lloyd became self-detached while filming in the 1940s and had to be hospitalized." This was as weird as the haunted cell phones. Self-detached?

Strange to say, Harold WAS filming then, the last movie he ever made, a flop called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. Preston Sturges, egged on by Howard Hughes, had convinced him to come out of retirement to make one more film, but it was a sad end to a brilliant career.

I'd brush the whole thing off as the rantings of a nut, except. Except that Harold was fascinated with the arcane, had a tremendously powerful mind, loved his country and would have done anything to serve it, and had the curiosity of a child genius. Through his deep involvement in freemasonry, which is now thought of as some sort of Satanic conspiracy deal rather than just a dull men's club, he could have found out about this stuff, or even been approached. It is not that far-fetched when you look at some of the experimentation that went on in that era, behaviour modification, LSD, sleep deprivation, psychological torture, etc. And probably worse.

Was Harold involved in this weird shit? He was involved with Howard Hughes, though not happily. AND William Randolph Hearst, though to survive in Hollywood back then you didn't have much choice. I just don't want to rule it out, though as with the Wrigley Zoo, I have no proof. The site is gone, and that video - I just tried to look it up, and it looks like it has vanished too.

Weird. Or what.

Post-whatever. As usual, I did find more. Strangely, a record exists with five commercials from the Wrigley Zoo series (so it really did exist!). We have audio, but I don't know what happened to the video - confiscated by the CIA, perhaps?

WRIGLEY ZOO ~ rare 1960's 7" + cover (5 commercials)

Share on twitterMore Sharing ServicWRIGLEY ZOO Soundtrack

WRIGLEY ZOO SOUNDTRACK
Words and Music from Wrigley Zoo TV Commercials

(Wrigley B-3099)

Rare original 1960's one-sided compact 7" 33rpm record, featuring five vintage "Wrigley Zoo" TV spots. Includes the commercials for Buster Beaver, Bobby Bear (not to be confused with the country singer), Melvin Monkey, Clara Camel and Susan Seal. "Clap hands, one-two / Let's take a trip to the Wrigley Zoo / Chitter-chatter, yakety-yak / When you talk to the animals, they talk back".

Record is VG++, plays very cleanly and sounds great. Labels are near mint. Cardboard stock picture sleeve is VG++. Scarce collectible in top condition.

Winning bidder pays shipping costs as follows:

US rates for one 7" record are $2.95 for first class or media mail, or $5.95 for priority mail. You may combine multiple items to save costs -- shipping is only 50 cents per each additional 7" record. For more than 8 records shipped together, media mail replaces first class.

Airmail shipping to Canada is $2.95 for the first 7" record and $1.00 for each additional.

International airmail shipping (other than Canada) is $4.95 for the first 7" record and $1.50 for each additional. Rates for multi-record sets or EP's with heavy cardboard covers may be slightly higher. Please note: unfortunately, due to rampant mail fraud and unreceived items, I DO NOT ship to Italy or South America. All records are securely packed with extra cardboard stiffeners for extra protection. If you use PayPal for multiple items, please make a single payment for all auctions combined. Otherwise, combined shipping rates will not apply. Please check out my other auctions or For a large selection of additional CD's at bargain prices, please visit my partner mousewink's eBay auctions. 04.04.004

And as a bonus, I found some info on a series of pop-ups - books or cards or something (? - not clear exactly what they were, except they popped up). There are a few photos of them, for sale on eBay and the like.