Some words to live by

 

The Troll Doll Channel: 💦I give my Dirty Trolls a BATH!💦

I seldom wash a troll's hair unless it's seriously dirty or sticky. The color can actually leach out, and the texture become frizzy and dry. But in this case there was serious dirt in the ceramic troll's hair. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was a bloody mess: though it was obviously meant to be pink, it was more of a stringy brown, especially at the ends. My cave troll was in better shape hair-wise, but I felt he still needed work. Pinkie first got a thorough shampoo, in which I really had to work the dirt out, and rinse and rinse. Cave guy was more of a swish job, but once it had been wet and fluffed and dried, a miracle happened and the mohair doubled or tripled in volume, while maintaining the nice wooly texture and contrasting coloiurs. My troll vids are getting VERY low views now, while some of my others are getting hundreds or even thousands - so I've had to adjust my expectations, though of all my videos, the bird ones and the troll ones are the most gratifying. They've helped me keep those vital hobbies going, and I have to sometimes tell myself - if even ONE person looks at my videos, it's one more than would have seen them if I didn't bother. So. . . I bother. 

The Prince and the Fraud: Prince Harry and Gabor Mate

 

'Trauma expert' Gabor Mate says he bitterly REGRETS controversial Prince Harry interview because of 'demeaning, dismissive' backlash he faced - saying 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his life and made him 'lose himself'

• Harry's conversation with the doctor, 79, was fiercely scrutinized back in March
• At the time, it was revealed Gabor had previously made anti-Zionist comments
• He has now addressed the backlash, admitting that it left him in a 'dark place'

'Trauma expert' Gabor Maté has admitted that he regrets his controversial interview with Prince Harry because the 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his entire life and made him 'lose himself.'

Back in March, the Duke of Sussex, 39, spoke with the the Hungarian-Canadian doctor, 79, about 'living with loss and the importance of personal healing,' while promoting his memoir Spare.

During their sit-down, which was live-streamed on the web and cost $33 to watch, Harry made a series of bombshell claims about growing up as a royal.

The conversation was fiercely scrutinized, especially after it was brought to light that Gabor had made a series of eyebrow-raising comments in the past - like comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists.

He is also an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

Now, the author and physician has addressed the public's 'demeaning, dismissive, and distorted' reaction to his chat with Harry, while revealing that it left him in a really 'dark place.'

'There was an incredible social media reaction to it, which was, for the most part, so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted,' he said during a recent appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast.

'I barely even know how to talk about it. I thought by this age I would know better, but you know what, it really got to me.'

Gabor said the backlash left him in a 'really negative state of mind' and feeling like he 'lost himself' - leading to him eventually reaching out to a psychiatrist for help.

'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest,' he continued. 'It's so difficult to ask for help but I did.'

He accused the media of twisting his words and recalled them calling him things like 'stern, overbearing, and a merchant of pain.'

After speaking to a psychiatrist, however, Gabor said he later realized that his problems didn't have to do with the criticism, but rather, stemmed from an 'old unresolved wound' from his past. 

According to Gabor, he had reservations about talking to Harry from the start, since he was uncomfortable with the idea of making people pay to watch it.

Gabor said the backlash put him a 'really negative state of mind' and resulted in him feeling like he 'lost himself' during an appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast

The conversation was live-streamed on the web and tickets were priced at $33. People who watched it received a copy of Harry's book, Spare

'I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree the way they set it up. Because the way it was set up, to watch it, people had to buy a copy of Harry's book,' he explained. 

'I thought, "This is not fair, four million people have already bought the book. Why can't they watch this interview?" They had to buy another copy. 

'I believed this should be a free public service from two people who are having a very interesting conversation. 

'But out of sheer opportunism I agreed to it. I didn't follow my gut feeling. I agreed to something that I didn't really like. 

'Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him, I didn't like the idea of putting myself behind a pay wall. I lost myself just in agreeing to do it.'

Despite his regrets about the interview, Gabor insisted that he 'doesn't care' what the public thinks of him anymore.

But he said he wants people to 'see him' for who he is and 'not some distorted version.'

'I don't care if people agree with me or if they refute my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying, not some distorted version created by their own minds,' he concluded. 

'So what if someone says [something bad about me]. I don't live in the press. I don't live in someone else's mind. Here I am. Let them think and say what they want.'

Gabor said that after the interview, he had to reach out to a psychiatrist for help, adding, 'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest.' Harry is seen during their chat

Gabor has more than two decades of experience working with people suffering from addiction and mental illness - and he fiercely believes that all of the problems we face as adults stem from trauma we endured as children. 

Gabor has been scrutinized for comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists

He himself had a traumatic upbringing. He was born in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, and when he was five months old his maternal grandparents were among the Jews murdered in Auschwitz. He was then taken from his mother and hidden with an aunt until the war ended. 

He is an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

The psychedelic plant, which is taken as a brewed drink, causes people to experience hallucinations and other side effects, including vomiting - something Prince Harry has admitted to using to manage his 'trauma and pain.'

It remains illegal in the US, UK, and Canada, and in 2011, Canadian officials threatened to arrest Dr Maté if he didn't stop using the drug to treat his patients. 

On top of his shocking anti-Zionist comments, Gabor has also contributed to a pro-Kremlin website that defends brutal regimes around the world and has spoken warmly of the spittle-flecked Pink Floyd star and alleged 'Putin apologist' Roger Waters.

OK THEN! Time for the blogger to intervene.

I have too much to say about Gabor Mate (and won't write a poem about him, though I think I did once). I did meet the man back in 2003, interviewing him for January Magazine, an online publication which never paid me one red cent for all my hard work. He had just written his second book, When the Body Says No, which is one of those titles that sounds like a lot, but means very little. 

I think I was taken in by his guru-hood even then, though at the time he was still an actual doctor, a family practitioner working on the  cruel streets of Vancouver. He even gave me a tour of his downtown office, and showed me around the sights, i. e. the various addicts standing around in their different states of dereliction. He seemed hyper, severe, with an unreadable face that I was soon to learn only had one expression.

He's likely the only person I ever met who doesn't smile. I mean, he doesn't. In the rare "smiling" photos, it's more like a wince, with alarmingly dead eyes. He never laughs - I mean, he does not laugh. He was full of bombast during our coffee talks, but had no real warmth, no sense of the joy of living. In fact, I consider him one of the most joyless human beings I've ever met. And he cannot survive if he is not playing the role of the perpetual saviour.

Unfortunately, this has worked all too well for him, and his fans are cultish in their devotion. One even described him as "like having Jesus back here on earth". When you look at his detestable pro-Hamas views, his baffling and even frightening alliance with Russia, you've got to wonder how Jesus could have gotten so fucked up.

At any rate, though there's more, I am weary of the subject already and don't want to waste another brain cell on him. For all his Messianic posturing, the guy is about as resilient as an ice cube on a hot summer's day. There's no "there" there, no real substance, and no real joy.

The doctor has been unmasked, and he cannot stand it.. In one breath he says people's comments nearly destroyed him, then immediately says he does not care two figs about what anyone says. Hypocrisy, much? Or is his memory so faulty he doesn't remember what he said just a minute ago?

😳Back Yard Bear: OMG, he's HUGE!😳

We did not welcome this visitor to our back yard! Since then we've taken down all our bird feeders. From teeming with squawking birds and screeching squirrels, we now have NOTHING out there. Deadly silence. But we can't risk having bears habituated to our "feeding station". A fed bear is a dead bear, and though this guy's a nuisance, he is magnificent and we don't want anything to happen to him. We're on the very edge of a large green space with a creek running through it, and the creek is now full of spawning salmon  which will soon die and become appealingly stinky to the bears. We don't wish to provide them with suet and seeds for dessert.

The Troll Doll Channel: Unboxing of RARE Swedish and Irish Imports!

These guys are both extremely rare, and cost remarkably little. It's so fun doing these, and Bill now operates the camera so I don't have to use my doddering collapsible tripod that my son used for astronomy in 1985. 

The Troll Doll Channel: 💜Ready for Halloween: spooky, magical JUJU DOLL!💚

These are two of my favorite custom trolls going for a spin to the Monty Python theme. 

💚BUTTS UP! Dabbling, Dunking Ducks

Here at the duck park, the mallards are endlessly entertaining. Here a handsome drake turns himself upside-down, paddling furiously while he forages around in the muck. 

Sanzhi UFO City: Get me out of here!

 

Sanzhi UFO houses

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sanzhi UFO houses (Chinese: 三芝飛碟屋; pinyin: Sānzhī Fēidiéwū), also known as the Sanzhi pod houses or Sanzhi Pod City, were a set of abandoned and never completed pod-shaped buildings in Sanzhi District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. The buildings resembled Futuro houses, some examples of which can be found elsewhere in Taiwan. The site where the buildings were located was owned by Hung Kuo Group.

Construction and abandonment

The UFO houses were constructed beginning in 1978. They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast adjacent to Tamsui, and were marketed towards U.S. military officers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was never completed in 1980 due to investment losses and several car accident deaths and suicides during construction, which is said to have been caused by the inauspicious act of bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for widening the road to the buildings. Other stories indicated that the site was the former burial ground for Dutch soldiers.

The pod-like buildings became a minor tourist attraction due in part to their unusual architecture. The structures have since been subject of a film, used as a location by MTV for cinematography, photographed by people, and become a subject in online discussions, described as a ghost town or "ruins of the future". The houses are referred to in the title of a track on the experimental German pianist Hauschka's 2014 LP Abandoned City.

Demolition

The buildings were scheduled to be torn down in late 2008, despite an online petition to retain one of the structures as a museum. Demolition work on the site began on 29 December 2008, with plans to redevelop the site into a tourist attraction with hotels and beach facilities.

By 2010, all of the UFO houses had been demolished and the site was in the process of being converted to a commercial seaside resort and water-park.

BLOGGER'S NOTES. This isn't the first time I encountered Pod City - I remember reading about it years and years ago. One of the photos was an aerial view that made me reel. It was like a host of evil mushrooms squatting and rotting on the ground.

This sent me into a frenzy of gif-making, some of it quite surreal. I actually found some YouTube video, very early urbex-type exploration of the insides of some of these things. I  would imagine it was taken before the demolition in 2010.

But wait. Part of me doesn't believe it's been torn down. There's just something about this story - the bisected dragon, the "curse" leading to tragic deaths and suicides - it's like King Tut's tomb, for God's sake! Why hasn't anyone written more about this? This is a whole science fiction movie waiting to be made. 

There is a slight cheat here. The yellow structures in some of the gifs are likely Futuro houses, which I don't even want to get into. They look UFO-ish in the most classic My Favorite Martian sense, with evil portals all around them that stare like malevolent eyes. There are some of them left in Taiwan, most of them rotting away, though the original Pod City is supposed to be gone. Supposed to be. If this were the X Files, Scully and Mulder would be on it by now.

http://www.stopabductions.com/

Autumn purrs and purrs!

 

Autumn was the matriarch (catriarch?)  of our cat family. She left us during the pandemic, but since then  my son's family has adopted two lovely lady cats, Moonie and Luna. Added to Shannon's Mia and Max, and of course our wonderful Bentley, we are now a five-cat family!

😳"SMOKING makes you FEEL BETTER!" How Big Tobacco Lied to the Public

Something "wonderful" happens! Big Tobacco pushed blatant lies on the public for decades, but this is one of the worst I've ever seen. You'll "feel better" when you switch to Philip  Morris! Then they list all the dreadful health effects of smoking, raw throat, burning sinuses, terrible taste and, worst of all, "that smoked-out feeling" - and ALL of these things are instantly erased! Vanished! Gone forever! 

See, folks? Smoking is only uncomfortable (meaning: DANGEROUS) when you smoke the wrong brand - that other guy's brand. Then there comes the predictable image of a doctor holding up a pack of Philip Morris to recommend them to their patients who smoke, presumably because they're SO much safer. 

Lies and more lies, and yet it went on well into  the 1980s when restaurants still had "smoking sections". I will never forget watching a documentary on Big Tobacco and hearing a former executive tell us all that there is NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRANDS. None. Tobacco is tobacco is tobacco. NOBODY smokes for the "flavor", they smoke because they are addicted to nicotene and can't stop, and nobody "feels better" just because they switched their brand. And why did smoking make people feel so bad in the first place? Can you guess?