Boyhood photo of Thomas Edison (and hilarious comments from Vintage News!)

Boyhood photo of Thomas Edison

Comments (from The Vintage News)

This is what a young thief and con man looks like.

A con man and a thief? Are you sure this isn't Elon Musk?

I'm sure there's always been stupid people. But with the emergence of social media in recent times, you actually get to see firsthand exactly how dumb and gullible some truly are…

General electric and Edison ruined Nicola Tesla. History is always written by the victors regardless of whether they are thieving psychopaths or not.

So much rancor for the man! As a boy he was my hero. Working on the Grand Trunk railroad on the baggage car. His chemicals starting the fire and the conductor throwing him off. It was all so brave.

Probably thinking about how he can take credit for other people's ideas.

Thinking about profit his own selfishness and screwing the rest of the world.

I bet he stole the camera for that picture too

Show me the picture of Thomas Edison as a girl too!

For people who believe everything "The Oatmeal" claims about Edison and Tesla

Edison's ideas came from a think tank. It's safe to say he "stole" from a wide variety of people.

Teddy he sure did

Quiet.....Bet most of you thought Tesla was just a car and had to Google to learn otherwise

A hero renowned for his infamy as grand thief of someone else's genius.

That face you make when you know you can steal well.

The smiling face of a future con man, before he became a thug and a thief.

What a smarmy looking little shitbird.

Probably stole that outfit.




Sweet favorite boy of the banksters.

He looks radiant in this photo

Would he be anything else?

He dreamed of 'Westinghousing' an elephant.

someone should’ve punched the kid in the face

I was just about to say that.

He later claimed to have invented the scarf.

And Bell may have been a thief as well.

"Here I go stealin' again"

What s bright spark

He got old young.

Original mugshot.

As opposed to a girl

Bully.

Lookie that lil thief

Legendary!

Looks like Oliver

Dodgy lil prick

Relative of yours?

Wanker

A thief and a crook

Stop hating

of course! 😂😂😂😂

Look at that smile. What a piece of garbage

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I needed a laugh, and I got one. I have always hated pompous assholes who steal other people's ideas for their own glory, so this actually made me laugh out loud. I'd have to include on the list Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and (yes!) Walt Disney. My generation would have been horrified to see these comments. My generation was full of shit. Everyone disses comments sections, but in this case I think they're right on the money.

PANDEMIC HAIR UPDATE: two years and counting!

I cannot believe that it has been nearly TWO YEARS since I had a professional hair cut. I was cutting it myself for a while, with a razor comb, and for a WHILE it looked OK. . .then when it stopped looking OK, I was surprised to find there were things I liked about it (along with things I DIDN'T like about it). This is as close to blonde as I've ever been since early childhood. I have more than two months to wait to get it cut, and by then I should be wearing it in braids.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE! YEAH! I got it cut! NOT radically, as I went to a brand-new stylist, which I haven't done in 20+ years. But I figured I must have been a very low priority to my former stylist to put me off for ten weeks or so. You'd think there would be a tad more loyalty displayed to a 20-year customer. I told the lady who books appointments for her, "I only need a cut", thinking that would get me in sooner - but it was the opposite. She has filled up her schedule with ornate "dos", perhaps in anticipation of Christmas, and a mere cut doesn't bring in much revenue. So it seems I went to the bottom of the heap.

Meantime - I walked into Superstore, no appointment, went to the salon which is part of the store, and ten minutes later was having an expert cut and hearing about how GORGEOUS my hair is (I'm only quoting!), and how I shouldn't get it coloured or cut too short (which I didn't!). "You have grey hair with highlights? Is this natural? I've never seen that before. No, I mean it. It doesn't even look grey, it looks blonde, with lighter-blonde streaks." She did say it, readers, that's verbatim. 

I haven't felt this good about my hair in - ever, I guess. THEN came the ultimate compliment: we went over to my son's house for dinner, and my VERY style-conscious 16-year-old (blonde) granddaughter Erica looked closely at me and said, "I like your hair." She has never said anything like that before! Though the stylist took maybe 1/2" to 1" off, it now has some shape to it, and some of the heavy, dense "flop" at the back is lighter - meaning the natural curl has sprung back to life. And yeah, I DO have natural curl - but who knew?

Sorry if this sounds narcissistic, but wow! This is just a parable of how the worst thing ("oh my God, I haven't had a haircut in a year and a half and it looks DREADFUL") can come out better than you hoped. And this is as blonde as I've ever been in my life. For 30+ years, I covered it up because stylists INSISTED that grey was the enemy, grey was ugly, grey made you look "older" (the WORST thing that can happen to a woman!), and I had to pony up and have them cut it and colour the daylights out of it. Now I see how much of this was and is economically-driven. 

Dye jobs cost. Perms cost, Straightening costs. So does curling. Taking the curl OUT, putting the curl IN. This lady said, "Oh, you have such nice hair!", then neatened up the back and tapered the ends and made it into a hair style. It cost me $30.00, including a 20% tip. Lesson learned? 

This whole thing reminds me of renovating an old house that has had nothing done to it for decades, then ripping up the rotten old "wall-to-wall" carpet that used to cover up the "ugly"  flooring - and discovering gorgeous, glossy, nearly-new-looking hardwood underneath. But in my day, a million years ago, hardwood meant you were "poor" and couldn't afford to look luxurious. It was as if hardwood was just compacted dirt. Now we see things kind of differently.

🌺The Troll Doll Channel: THE CAROUSEL WALTZ!🌷

Some of my more gorgeous trolls go for a spin. 

Stereoscopic images shimmer into life. . .

 

 

I have had these on file for YEARS and have just made them into a YouTube video, but I kind of like them the way they are. Call them the VERY FIRST motion pictures (consisting of two frames!

Oh God, this is the BEST video ever.

No, I mean it. On a relatively crappy day, this was just what I needed.

😲DAISY: "ONE MORE TIME!"😲

Oh God. This "Daisy" thing - it started out with another video, a creepy thing featuring the FIRST EVER computer to be programmed to "sing" (IBM something-or-other - I don't retain numbers very well). This was in 1961, so ANYTHING a computer"sang" sounded miraculous. The weird, robotic recording reminded me of Stephen Hawking, and I just had to use it for something - so I put it together with a visual from another bizarre talking-robot video, completely unrelated. They just looked cool together, though they were never meant to be synchronized.

Though I did not realize it at the time, the 1961 audio of "Daisy" had blown up on TikTok. I was/am barely aware of TikTok except as a rude presence on YouTube, or something my grandgirls giggle over. At this point, apparently due to the TikTok phenomenon, my own video has had well over 3,500,000 views - yes, I mean THREE AND A HALF MILLION, and my subscriber count has jumped from about 300 to well over 8,000. All because of "Daisy", and a TikTok video I knew nothing about.

BUT, then I started thinking about another version of "Daisy" - the one many of us recognize from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (and I have to spell the title out so people won't think I'm referring to 9-11). In the most memorable scene in the whole movie, Dave is shutting down the evil computer HAL, and as his mind becomes increasingly childish, he begins to sing. . . "Daisy", getting slower and slower as he runs out of juice, or whatever it is that makes computers "go". 

A LOT of people became confused because my first video talked about the "2001" version. So I found it and glommed it on to Motormouth again, this time in slow motion. Which version is creepier? I think the HAL one, because as he slowly loses all his intellectual powers, it creates the macabre impression that a computer is "dying". 

It's obvious to me now that HAL's song was a sly reference to the 1961 IBM version, but only hard-core techno-geeks would have gotten the joke. And think about it: the movie came out in 1968, only seven years later. 

😳ROBORAMA! Robot imitates human speech: AGAIN!😳

I Contain Multitudes: the songs seem to know themselves

 

Bob Dylan   

On writing "I Contain Multitudes"

I didn’t really have to grapple much. It’s the kind of thing where you pile up stream-of-consciousness verses and then leave it alone and come pull things out. In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line. It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state. Most of my recent songs are like that. The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.

Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells

The Bells  

Edgar Allan Poe

 I.

        Hear the sledges with the bells—
                 Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
        How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
        While the stars that oversprinkle
        All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
       From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II.

        Hear the mellow wedding bells,
                 Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
        Through the balmy air of night
        How they ring out their delight!
           From the molten-golden notes,
               And all in tune,
           What a liquid ditty floats
    To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
               On the moon!
         Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
               How it swells!
               How it dwells
           On the Future! how it tells
           Of the rapture that impels
         To the swinging and the ringing
           Of the bells, bells, bells,
         Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III.

         Hear the loud alarum bells—
                 Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
       In the startled ear of night
       How they scream out their affright!
         Too much horrified to speak,
         They can only shriek, shriek,
                  Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
            Leaping higher, higher, higher,
            With a desperate desire,
         And a resolute endeavor
         Now—now to sit or never,
       By the side of the pale-faced moon.
            Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
            What a tale their terror tells
                  Of Despair!
       How they clang, and clash, and roar!
       What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
       Yet the ear it fully knows,
            By the twanging,
            And the clanging,
         How the danger ebbs and flows;
       Yet the ear distinctly tells,
            In the jangling,
            And the wrangling.
       How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
             Of the bells—
     Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
            Bells, bells, bells—
 In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV.

          Hear the tolling of the bells—
                 Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
        In the silence of the night,
        How we shiver with affright
  At the melancholy menace of their tone!
        For every sound that floats
        From the rust within their throats
                 Is a groan.
        And the people—ah, the people—
       They that dwell up in the steeple,
                 All alone,
        And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
          In that muffled monotone,
         Feel a glory in so rolling
          On the human heart a stone—
     They are neither man nor woman—
     They are neither brute nor human—
              They are Ghouls:
        And their king it is who tolls;
        And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
                    Rolls
             A pæan from the bells!
          And his merry bosom swells
             With the pæan of the bells!
          And he dances, and he yells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
             To the pæan of the bells—
               Of the bells:
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
            To the throbbing of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the sobbing of the bells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
            As he knells, knells, knells,
          In a happy Runic rhyme,
            To the rolling of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the tolling of the bells,
      Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
              Bells, bells, bells—
  To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. 

The Gorgon in her Lair

I do not soon forget. In fact - never.

 

🤡PRINCE HARRY JUGGLES HIS BALLS!🤡

Ghost Elephants

Elephant Eternity

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is shining
All over the elephant earth

Adrian Mitchell

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants with your cargo of summer leaves at night I heard you breathing at the window Don't you ever think I'm not crying since you're away from me Don't ever think I went free At first the goodbye had a lilt to it— maybe just a couple of months— but it was a beheading. Ghost elephant, reach down, cross me over Jean Valentine    The Elephant is slow to mate The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste they wait for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd, and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word. So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. D. H. Lawrence

Lost, found. . . and found again: The Elephant Song

THE ELEPHANT SONG

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong, a-tong!
That is thc rhythm of the elephant song,
As the big grey elephants shuffle along.
To the sing, song, singing of tho old brass bell,
To the shrill, harsh stridence of the mahoot's yell,
To the shuff-shuff-shuffle of the great round feet,
The elephants are swinging down the village street.

A priest peers out from his while-washed cell,
As he hears the ringing of the elephant bell.
A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse,
A baby peers from the arms of its nurse,
A cobra dances to a charmer's tune,
The incense wavers in the shrine of the moon,
The street dogs scamper, the children scurry,
A woman hum-hums as she fixes curry,
While the bells keep ringing, like a. distant gong,
Tong, tong, tong-a-tong. a-tong,
The swing-along rhythm of the elephant song.



This is one of those things with a long story attached to it. I remember this poem from about Grade 3/4 (which I took in one year, with Miss Wray, one of those spinster teachers that used to be so common back then). I remember her reading this out loud, and loving it: the swinging rhythm of it, the vivid imagery.

A couple of lines stayed with me: "The elephants are swinging down the village street," and "A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse". Typical of the times, nothing was explained to us, so we had no idea what a "fakir" was (our teacher pronounced it "faker"), and none of us asked.

Then the poem simply disappeared.



Over the years, I've done searches, tried to scare it up. A few years would pass, and I would try again. I was beating the bushes and not finding it. I googled the lines I could remember. (For some reason, in my head I heard the poem rhythmically chanted by a choir of people: perhaps a reflection of a 78 rpm Babar recording in which there was a Greek chorus in the background).

I decided it was dead and unreachable, somehow deemed no longer important. I didn't wonder if I had imagined it, because I remembered more than one line. I knew it was real. But I had no idea of the author's name.



I still don't. I finally found it, incredibly, in a newspaper archive from 1946. It had won the Weekly Poetry Prize in The Advocate, a newspaper that appeared to be Australian (I couldn't read the original at all: it was just a distorted jumble of flyspeck type that made no sense no matter how much it was blown up). The headlines mentioned sheepdog contests called "cooees". Strange.

But beside the yellowed archive was a transcript of the poem - or at least I thought it was the poem - though every line had 5 or 6 errors in it, in syntax, spelling. . . so I had to piece it together from the faulty fragments, using my memory and imagination.

I think this is the poem. There are two names after it, all garbled up: Dan Mantlin and Audrey Cullen, but it's not clear if either of them wrote it.

Is it the stereotypical portrayal of India (where I assume it is set)? Surely there are far more racist poems out there that haven't dropped so far out of sight. Personally, I love the imagery, the rhythm, the pounding of the great round feet and the hypnotic tinkling of those bells. It would never be taught to children now, and it's a little too childish for adults to be exposed to. It belongs to another time, which is maybe what I love about it the most.

💥💎Diamonds on the Water💎💥

A dazzling moment on Como Lake.

💐🌹🌼ADORABLE! Victorian Ballerina Cats🌼🌹💐 (animation)

Hey, it looks like I'm "back" (not that I was ever away). After a brief moment of panic, YouTube is once again allowing me to post videos without going in circular gyrations that take forever and may not even yield results. This is one of my earliest animations, likely made for Facebook or perhaps for this blog, which I have transformed into YouTube videos. I came to rhe realization that I had THOUSANDS of gifs - I can't even count how many - that I spent a tremendous amount of time on, posed once, then filed away. Some of them are good enough to work on some more, adding sound/music and being given a second life. Sounds like a theme!

It's the end of an era

 

We-e-e-e-ellll, it's the end of an era for me. YouTube is no longer posting videos directly from the site, and since THAT is where I got them, I'm having to take the long way around. A pain, but that's "progress". Blogger is now a very old and kind of outdated app, and even though I DID update the look of it fairly recently - I don't even know if the saved ones will work now. This is a pain mainly because long entries are kind of sparse now - pandemic has changed everything, including how much time I have to actually write something coherent. The thumbnail at least SEEMS to be correct here - YT has been casually taking them off and putting up random screen-grabs, when I generally put more into my thumbnails than into the videos. So I don't even know if THIS will work any more, and if it doesn't, this blog will have to revert back to still photos and text (as it began!). I guess Blogger is no longer considered "hip" enough, and I am DONE with Facebook, and this time I reeeeally mean it! I am surprised to see at least a fragment of the custom thumbnail here, when it's not showing up anywhere else. YT is "adding" features, meaning it is subtracting others. And all on a November Monday. 

UPDATE. As I look at this, it really looks OK - I just have to take the extra step of copying and pasting the address up top. Actually, it looks a hell of a lot better so far, and I can make it any size, and you can also watch it on YouTube easily. But how I wish they'd warn us about changes, rather than just pulling the rug out from under. They "roll out" changes as if it's some kind of bloody red carpet. Anyway, I seem to be able to watch this, so hope you can too.