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It's Halloween. The lamp is lit.

Around the fire we children sit

And telling ghost-tales bit by bit,

'Til sister Jane says "HUSH!"

Who's that creeping on the kitchen floor?

Who's that sneaking round the bedroom door?

Who's that squeaking like his throat is sore?

IT'S A GOBLIN!!

Why I remember this tattered bit of song from my school days - maybe grade 3 or 4 (and I took 3 and 4 in one year, which was then called "skipping" but which meant the curriculum was combined so that I could go into a "special" Grade 5) is a mystery to me, but it's one of those things that flies out of the junkyard of all my past lives and hits me on the head like flying shrapnel.

I say grade 3 or 4, rather than 5 or 6, because I seem to remember, vaguely, the music teacher from McKeough School in Chatham vigorously leading the choir, which was made up of "canaries" and "bluebirds", or something like that (i. e, the kids who couldn't sing were literally in their own little stigmatized group, not allowed to mix with the better singers). McKeough School was an old horror of a building which was turned into a heritage site in the '80s, but which may well have been converted into retail space by now - like that OTHER horror, Park Street Untied Church (about which I still get an inquiry once in a while when somebody takes a bit of interest in Rev. Russell Horsburgh, whom I have written about in several posts, years and years ago. I don't recommend you read them.)

I can't and won't go into other Hallowe'en memories (and we DID spell it with the apostrophe, a contraction of "evening" - I guess - and when I saw it spelled in that archaic way recently, I was puzzled. Do they still do that in Britain? Do they even HAVE Hallowe'en in the UK?), because I don't have too many. One time, though - my mother actually sewed my outfit, a black velvet cat costume which caused one guy in a car to yell out, "What's new, pussycat?" to a startled eight-year-old, trick-or-treating me.

I have to get on with my day now. I made this goofy little video out of PicMix gifs, and post it here cuz I want my videos to have a second life somewhere. It surprises me how many views I get on YouTube for these little things, primitive as they are. But there is pushback now because, among other things, YT has become (as they used to say in the '60s) "plastic" - too slick, too manufactured, too uniform, too DULL like a loud TV commercial, all monetized and out to grab your cash. And why is it that so many YTers KEEP ON SAYING, "Like, subscribe, hit the notification bell. . ." at the end of every single video, when everyone who has ever watched even ONE YT video knows all about that stuff? Just as actors shouldn't insult their audience and authors should not insult their readers, YT should not be insulting people who have actually SEEN the little symbols for like, subscribe, and notification at the bottom of EACH AND EVERY video.

But I digress.

Hometown dreams: 1964

Images of Chatham, which I often feel nostalgic about, as if it's a dreamscape instead of the mixed bag of nightmares it was. My best year was when I was ten. After that it went downhill.

Unreel: the lost art of the film countdown

This is an example of something that affected my childhood just as profoundly as those horrendous Civil Defense TV announcements with their headsplitting deeeeeeeeeet sound that convinced me I was heading for certain doom ("This is only a test").  During the Cuban Missile Crisis it very nearly happened, but that is another story.

When I was going to McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario, back in 19-blah-whatever, every once in a while there would be an Announcement. This would come from one of the spinster schoolteachers (all our teachers were Miss Somebody-or-other, no men or married women, we didn't think they could teach), and would set our little hearts a-thumping: we would be seeing a "fillum" that day.

We were trooped with military precision down to the basement of that hideous neo-Gothic structure (recently ripped down due to dry rot and excessive haunting) and sat on the damp floor. This is how we did things, how we moved bodies around: we marched in to school to military music in the morning, the boys on one side of the building and the girls on the other, as if grade school kids were going to indulge in some sort of awful debauchery. 

There we saw a Fillum, or Fillums rather. These were boring beyond measure, always produced by the National Film Board, and had no story to them at all. They were industrial things about how to manufacture pencils, or prim lessons in manners and decorum, how to obey your parents, etc. etc., though sex was off the table then, if not forever.

I'll tell you why we were transfixed by all this. It was a Fillum, that's why, and a bit of a break from the deadly boredom of all those lessons on penmanship, obedience and being a good citizen. But most of all, it was because of THESE things, which I didn't know went by the prosaic name of film leaders. To me they were a sort of rocketship into the land of soaring imagination, or at least the National Film Board. We were told NOT to do the countdown out loud, though many of us whispered it and, of course, filled in the missing "2" and "1" (and I am still not sure why it is always absent). By this time the space race was on, so that we actually were listening to countdowns on TV as one pathetic rocket after another fizzled and fell.

There is still great mystery and beauty in these things, since they're all different and all so utterly incomprehensible. If they have a purpose, I will never know what it is. Maybe filmmakers strung them all together into a countdown stag reel, who knows. (I'd be up for it.)  

Anyway, they don't seem to exist any more, which makes them even more precious in my eyes. That sound, too - the phhht, blp, blp, THUD, bzzzztztzt - all that stuff, the fuzzy splicky staticky noises I'm having such trouble describing - these danced with the splashy urgency of the images, the rush of descending numbers, the flash of - what? - that thrilling countdown that so quickly disappeared.

So where am I getting these, from whence have I dredged them up after all these years? As is usually the case, I 'm not sure of their origin. Before YouTube, all this treasure was just lodged in the back of my brain somewhere, so that I really didn't know if it had happened or not. If I tried to talk to anyone about it, they looked alarmed, as if I had gone dangerously insane or was at least delusional, so I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut. Then, of course, it all turned out to be True, because here it is again, flashing right in front of my eyes in a never-ending Mobius of magic.

This last one is a bit of a cheat, since I was still on Gifsforum (poor, dear, defunct Gifsforum), which gave you many options, including three speeds, turning colour into black and white or sepia, and reversing direction, not to mention captions and gifs that lasted up to 30 seconds. (These, which seem fairly long compared to the violent 2-second lurches you usually see, are only 20 seconds maximum.) So just to see how it would look, I ran it backwards.

By the way, if you are very, very quick, you might be able to catch the subject of the film. I can see that one of them says "ice fishing" (it's only on one frame or something), and another says "Pream" (remember all the Pream gifs I posted a while ago? Oh well.) The leaders are mostly gleaned from those YouTube compilations of old commercials and/or TV sitcoms of the '50s like Topper and I Married Joan, and no doubt are edited out in a lot of cases. But give me the big, sloppy sprawl of rotting old video, the kind of Fillum we used to devour while sitting on the damp floor of the basement of McKeough School, give me that raw unedited footage complete with the wild ride of the leader with its mysterious. seemingly useless and impenetrable countdown.

P. S. Watch all of these, they're all different and it took me two years to make and collect them. I went to a lot of trouble. Okay?

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Elmer the Safety Elephant!

This was one of those late-night, treasure-trove finds that kind of made my head spin. It was a site of dozens and dozens of old (I mean OLD) photos of Kent County landmarks, especially schools in Chatham. I've already posted many pictures of McKeough School, a formidable-looking old brick building built in about 1906 that looks like something out of the Addams Family. But these shots were miraculous: it's Elmer the Safety Elephant!

Us kids eagerly looked forward to Elmer's visit every year. We were admonished to learn the "seven safety rules" (and I can only remember a few: look both ways before you cross the street; keep out from between parked cars; always carry something white at night). Then there was the Elmer the Safety Elephant anthem (Safety First) which is starting to make all this sound like the Hitler Youth or something. "Here's what Elmer has to say/On the streets you do not play. . . "

These photos were milky and bleary when I first uploaded them. They had the messy black border of an old Polaroid, the kind where you zip off a plastic cover with a sort of tar-like caustic substance on it. They were labelled with a white grease pencil. I decided to see if I could clean them up. I easily cropped them (and just now I realize that these are all scans, and would lose quality automatically), then hit the restore button. Oh boy! I was there again, one of those little tow-headed kids looking on in awe, standing in an exact straight line. Serried ranks.

I realize now that Elmer has huge blue eyes with lashes, making me think he's more of an Elephantina or Elephette. I only remembered the vast trunk, and the ears (and there was an awful rumor going on in about Grade 6 that Elmer's ear fell off, a real emergency when he was on his way to a visitation with the kids. The whole thing sounds like an urban legend to me.

I believe this is my Grade 6 class from Queen Elizabeth II School, the second school I attended. I recognize several of the teachers. I was given a battery of tests, I swear I remember this, in kindergarten, and I even remember a couple of the questions. I was asked to count to a hundred, and though I dried up at 29, the helpful teacher asked, "So what comes after the 20s?" "30s." "And what comes after the 30s?" (etc.) I got them all right. Then I was given a photo of an open field. "You've lost your wallet in this field. How would you go about finding it?" I did a sort of mazelike pattern from the outside in, something I frankly stole from my brother, but it passed.

So I began to take two grades in one year. In kid parlance, I "skipped". I was being prepared for a special, elitist Grade 5, the "Major Work Class" at QEII. This was one of those infamous '60s experiments in education in which bright kids all learned at their own pace, with little or no curriculum.

I had walked to McKeough, and I will never forget that blissful 10 or 15 minutes, which now seems like paradise. Suddenly I had to commute, a very long bus ride all the way across town. I immortalized our hapless teacher, Mr. Service, in my second novel Mallory: we drove him to a nervous breakdown by mid-term, and he had to be replaced. We kids had been told we were smart one too many times, and were beginning to turn into a sort of Smart Kids' Mafia. 

I didn't keep photos of QEII, though they exist, along with Chatham Collegiate (my high school) and The Pines Ursuline college, a nunnery where I took violin lessons. Talk about altogether ooky.

Didn't keep them because, except for the photo of my Grade 6 teachers, they don't especially interest me or twig any strong memories. They're just bland middle-of-the-road 1930s-built architecture, though CCI may be older than that.

Good to know they are there, however. Apparently, somebody still cares.

POST-BLOG OBSERVATIONS. Mostly the footwear. I notice many of the little girls in the front row are wearing their best shoes, Mary Janes with white knee socks. But I also notice argyle socks, and even saddle shoes, which I have always loved (but never owned, though I did have penny loafers in Junior High). I do remember being told to "dress up for Elmer", picking my Sunday School outfit which was unusual for a school day, my parents having received a notice that the distinguished elephant would be making his yearly appearance. When you think about it, putting your best clothes on for the benefit of a giant papier-mache head is a pretty bizarre concept, but no more bizarre than all the other things that happened at McKeough.

And where are all the black kids? Integration hadn't happened yet. By high school, that had changed. But I didn't find out until years after high school that Chatham was one of the termination points of the Underground Railroad, providing safe haven for runaway slaves before and during the Civil War. This should have been a point of pride, but it wasn't mentioned in school, not even once, in spite of Chatham's higher-than-average black population. My mother found out about it from a history book, not another person. I did sort of notice how many black kids there were, but I just figured it was a Windsor-Detroit thing (and by the late '60s, we DID know a lot about the Motown scene). Now I know that shameful and deliberate historical omission is as much a part of Southwestern Ontario history as those formidable old brick buildings.

Notice all the blonde heads! Nothing ethnic is going on here at all.

Though it isn't easy to make out in this photo, the kids faces are lit up with glee. Their body postures are full of eagerness and excitement. This Elmer visitation, like the McKeough School Picnic with the burning schoolhouse firecracker set off at the very end, is one of the highlights of their year, even though they come away from it with nothing except a bunch of safety rules.

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Haunted: the home town that lives in my head

We lived at 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Such a long handle, and a strange place.

I just had the urge to dig out some photos of the place. Plenty strange, but a beautiful old Edwardian-era house previously owned by the unmarried Terry sisters.

Since I first posted a different version of this piece a couple of years ago, a wealth of old Chatham photos has emerged from the vast wonderland of Google images. Thus fuzzy memories are brought into sharp relief, a new phenomenon that must be changing the human brain in some fundamental way (oh, THAT was what the church looked like! I thought it had windows on that side. Etc.) But nobody has noticed that yet. When I hear even the most insignificant names attached to Chatham, I get the queerest feeling, almost an ecstasy, but at the same time a longing so intense that it scares me. Oh, I want to go back, go back to when it was simpler, when milk was delivered by horse and wagon and Milky the Clown entertained us instead of Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb.



Plenty of the old houses in Chatham looked haunted, and very ugly. I used to wonder how anyone could live there. I remember sloshing along in rubber boots, walking home to have lunch (fried eggplant, if I was lucky) and watch Popeye. These were the vintage Popeyes made in the early 1930s, which I didn't see again until I found the DVD re-release a couple years ago.

It's all a pastiche or jigsaw or something. Making story means imposing order, usually, an order that really isn't there. So I won't make story today. Wait a minute. These weren't boots at all, but boot covers, something like the ubiquitous "galoshes" (talk about onomatopoeia!) that we all wore to protect our shoes. They leaked like mad, but that's what we did. Ladies wore little plastic bonnets to protect their hair, something like a shower cap.



I remember a bit of a song about pigeons with pink feet. Never mind. A capital ship for an ocean trip was the Walloping Window Blind. . .

Sugar beets. I remember the burny intense smell of sugar beets being processed into sugar. It reminded me of my Mum making something delicious called Burnt Sugar Pudding, a caramelized confection with a velvety texture. In those days, no one had to limit emissions in any way. There was the Lloyd (no kidding, it was really called Lloyd!) jute bag company. I didn't know what a jute bag even was until someone told me, "Dummy, it's a burlap sack."

And then there was Darling's, the most hideous smell in the world. This was most evident on the infamous sweatbox days of a Southwest Ontario summer, when the fumes were held down by a heavy lid of humidity. It was stomach-turning, a mixture of guts and hides and bones. They used to tell me it was a slaughterhouse, but no slaughterhouse could smell that bad. Later on my brother told me it was a rendering plant, i.e. glue factory: so maybe that's why no one told me the truth, so I wouldn't scream with horror that horses were being melted down so our postage stamps would stay on.



"Horse glue,"my husband said 200 years later. I thought about it. I was licking the boiled-down gluten of an old horse, maybe a retired racehorse with a blown tendon. It didn't bear thinking about.

What else?

A thump-thump, thump-thump. . . no, more like a "stock-stock-stock-stock", some sort of factory. God, Chatham seems now like it seethed with industry.

Plack. Plack. A neighbor, an old man named Salem Aldiss, used to take a flexible board and bend it back and let it snap on the cement. Hordes of starlings would shoosh up and blacken the sky, but soon they'd be back on the trees and powerlines, craaawwww! craaaaaaaw!craaaaaaaaaaw-ing in a vast creepy choir and leaving splats of guano that was most unpleasant to try to remove.



I think I bit my neighbor, it's so long ago. Shawne Aitken, Mr. Aldiss's granddaughter, used to come in the summer to stay with her grandparents. She lived in Sault Ste. Marie. I loved Shawne and maybe even had a mild crush on her, but when I was very very little I bit her I think. My mother was required to march me over to her house (only two houses down, not a long march) and apologize. Then Shawne, still a little weepy, gave me a sucker, and we were friends again. (Purple. The best sucker in the bag.)

I thought I was the only child who'd bitten someone in the history of the universe. That memory was squashed so far down in the "shame" bin that, like compacted paper or Jurassic mineral layers, it won't even come out properly. Maybe it's just as well.

There were two Pauls in kindergarten, Paul Sunnen and Paul Tunks. I didn't like Paul Tunks very much, he was fat and obnoxious, but I was in love with Paul Sunnen because he was thin and romantic, and a diabetic. I wasn't even sure what that was - it was called "sugar diabetes" in those days - but there were whisperings that he had to have needles. We all sat cross-legged in a circle embedded in the linoleum floors of the kindergarten room, and I always sat directly across from Paul Sunnen. We drank milk out of weird-looking little glass bottles and had to have a "milk ticket" to get it.



In kindergarten at McKeough School, we had two elderly spinster teachers, Miss McCutcheon and Miss Davy. In my memory, they are about nineteen feet high. My mother was tall as a sequoia. I remember hanging on to her apron and looking up, far up. Family legend has it that one day my mother said to me, "You don't like me." I answered, "You not bad." This sums up our entire relationship.

What else? Ann Peet, who could be nice to me or awful. They were Dutch and lived next door. They were poor in a much-mended sort of way, but clean and presentable, which my mother approved of. There were a lot of kids, Annie and Susan and Charles and Brian and. . Garnet, named after the mayor, Garnet Newkirk I think. Garnet John Cornelius Peet. When he was born, Ann went door to door to tell everyone, telling us his name was Garden John. Ann's father was in the war in Holland and told stories. Once he told her that the people were so hungry in occupied Holland that a woman ate her baby.



All this somehow made its way into Mallory, my second novel. Not sure how it evolved into such an autobiography. Anyway, Mr. Peet (Cornelius: did anyone call him Corny?) had pigeons, and I liked to climb over the (actual) white picket fence in our back yard and watch them reproduce. I had no idea what was going on and one day asked Mr. Peet what they were doing. "Dancing," he said, with a sly smile. One day I saw him bring home a live chicken in a jute bag (probably from Lloyd's). He grabbed its neck and took a knife and sliced its head off. The chicken's body flapped and convulsed all over the yard, while the beak on the severed head opened and closed.

My parents had dirty books. Under my Dad's underwear in the bureau drawer. My God, I must have had nerve. When they were both at choir practice, I would burrow around and find them. One was called Ideal Marriage and didn't say very much. Another one, much more dirty, was called ABZ and was a sort of encyclopedia of sex, originally published in Sweden or somewhere. There were whole pages that were blanked out that said, "This page has been removed by the publisher for violating obscenity laws," or something like that. They didn't just edit it out, they obliterated it. My Dad sold books and would sell Ideal Marriage to someone under the counter, but where the hell did this one come from - and, more to the point, what the hell was fellatio?



Oh, don't let's get into sex and Carmen Ferrie (she's probably still out there somewhere and is still red-haired and funny and smart and popular). She told me stuff, but I simply didn't believe it. Jesus! Even though I already knew from experience what an orgasm was, it was hard to believe that people would actually want to do that stuff.

I will leave horses aside, as I've covered them thoroughly in other posts. I will also have to leave Bondi for now, though it was a rapturous two weeks out of the year. Bondi hasn't changed a whole lot in all those years, and is still run by the same family, which somehow gives me hope.

Stamping on puddles with the little plastic boot-covers that fastened with a button and a piece of elastic. Plash.Stamp. And best of all - the spring flood, when the pitiless endless aching Ontario winter finally let go and released several tons of water all at once. It shooshed and roared. The street was like rapids. Some of the bigger sidewalk hollows still had ice over them, and it was pure ecstasy to stomp them and see and feel them shatter under your feet. Stamp. Crunch.


Around the corner, oh my god there was a little hill in the sidewalk! A little drop. It seemed like a thousand feet down. I was probably three and riding a tricycle. Is that drop still there? Back then a three-year-old was given complete freedom outside, not even watched. I couldn't ride up the hill and had to drag my tricycle up the grass, but I did it over and over again.

There was a strange church on the corner that said Jesus Saves, the kind of church we didn't go to, thank you very much. Too much singing. There was a sort of bar at the front entrance, and I'd hang off it like a sloth and pretend I was riding a horse that I called "Bet".




Oh and, the pervert in the park. When we were pre-teens, Shawne and I in those endless sweatbox summers went to Tecumseh Park because there was a swimming pool (kind of) and baseball games. I hated baseball but went with her anyway because it was something to do. There was a man, this guy. He had a funny smirky smile. He was sort of like "The Big Fat Man" of our very early childhood, a version of the Boogie Man (a rather fat elderly gentleman whom I am sure was completely harmless. When he saw me, he always said, "Hello, boy.") This guy, the funny smirky guy who looked a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald, just loitered around. He was always just out of eyeshot, and we giggled and ran away, having fun. Jesus, we could have been raped or killed. One time, just one time in the Chatham Daily News, there was a one-paragraph story about a paper boy who had been sodomized (how is this possible? But it's true) by an unknown stranger.



I retain memories of Chatham and feel a kind of bliss, which is weird because my childhood was anything but blissful. My Dad's drinking slowly and inexorably escalated until he became a staggering, booming tyrant. My older sister refused to believe any of my stories. He was a fine upstanding man, a wonderful father. But she hadn't been around him for ten years. She had gone to Europe, as far away as she could get, the other side of the world, even speaking another language that none of us knew. He sent her money. Briefly she acknowledged his alcoholism in a letter, and once told me she found him "oppressive", but she took it all back when I told her I had been sexually abused. The wagons went in a circle, and like all oppressive patriarchs, he was once again crowned with many crowns.

Dylan Thomas, you were wrong, this stuff is all shit, and jumbled as hell. I don't want to make story today. This is my life. I somehow came out of all this jumble. Branch led to branch. It's amazing I am still connected to one friend from those days, a little surreal. All this came from the rather ghastly sight of McKeough School, which I never really looked at because I was too busy marching in to military music.



Post-blog observings: I just realized, as I dug out a previous post about my old church being haunted by the notorious Russell Horsburgh, that all of Chatham-Kent and its surrounding communities is thick with apparitions. No kidding, there are ghost tours you can go on. When my friends and I walked by those old Gothic-looking brick buildings on Victoria Avenue, it would not have been much of a stretch to imagine they were haunted. But I never heard of any ghost tours. My own flirtings with the paranormal have never lead me anywhere significant - nothing has really happened, as far as I am concerned, to convince me that it's anything more than wishful thinking and/or my imagination. We all long to know what is on the "other side", and I suppose being a ghost is better than being nothing at all. Though I can see them wafting in and out of the windows of McKeough School (above), which is supposedly being renovated and used as a heritage site, I kind of hope they stay out of my house. Go back to Chatham where you belong!






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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".)

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