The Glass Character: fury

Showing posts with label fury. Show all posts

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Of course. . . of course!

Mister Ed

Original name: Bamboo Harvester

Birth:

1949

El Monte

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Death:

Feb. 22, 1979

Burbank

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Animal Actor. Mister Ed, a Palomino horse officially named Bamboo Harvester, was a show and parade horse who was foaled in 1949 in El Monte, California. His parents were The Harvester (Sire), a Saddlebred owned by Edna and Jim Fagan; and Zetna, (Dam) who was sired by Antez, an Arabian imported from Poland. Bamboo Harvester was trained by Lester Hilton. Lester "Les" Hilton had been apprenticed under Will Rogers, and also worked with the mules in the "Francis the Talking Mule" movies. Due to old-age ailments, Bamboo Harvester was put to sleep in 1970. The producer of the Mister Ed series never would answer the question of how the horse's lips were made to move. There have been many theories over the years, including the use of peanut butter, but none have been authenticated. (bio by: Ronald Leon)

Cause of death: Euthanized

Burial:

Snodgrass Farm

Tahlequah

Cherokee County

Oklahoma, USA

Maintained by: Find A Grave

Record added: Jan 01, 2001

Find A Grave Memorial# 1551

This is a cobbling-together of a post I spent about four hours on this morning. Trying to fix the formatting, which I do for nearly every post, it suddenly disappeared.

ALL of it. It was just a blank.

I mean, no backup. Didn't even go into a recycle bin or anything.

I feel stabbed, ripped off and as if something has been snatched away from me (like four hours that I can never get back). I don't know, all I can do to salvage this is put up some of the photos and whatever I remember of the text, though there were also three or four videos that were VERY hard to find, not to mention a gif that I can't recover.

Jesus.

Anyway, what I was GOING to say before the finished and polished post was ripped out of my hands, was something like this: as a little girl, I adored Mr. Ed, and I can see why. He was a character actor with a sweet face, and he was also a handsome palomino, a former parade horse, his shiny coat coming across well even in grainy black-and-white.

The show we saw on TV wasn't the original. There was a failed pilot starring the same horse, but a different Wilbur. This Wilbur was a clinker, and it didn't fly. But there was something about Ed. Network execs must have decided to give him another try.

(Now that I think of it, black lines kept appearing at the sides. Did that mean something? This version is awful, but I feel I must continue, damn it.)

Oh, what else? I wrote something about My Friend Flicka, a 1950s series which is now posted in its entirety on YouTube. At one point, I would have killed to see even one episode, but now I find I can't stomach Johnny Washbrook and the way he's always crying. He's a fairly good horseman, and the horse is beautiful (of course, of course!). But it was mainly that theme song I loved as a kid. It began with a little harp-stroke which isn't in most of the YouTube vids. It's cut off, probably because most people didn't notice it. But to me, it meant magic was about to begin. This video may or may not have it, because I don't remember which one I posted originally. Took me a while to find it, too.

There were others, National Velvet, Fury. . . Fury was, I have to admit, the best horse actor, and the handsomest of all. In fact, he was simply stunning. But the show involved a lot of shrill whistling and irritating yelling: "Fuuuuuuuuuu-reeeeeeeee!" . And NOWHERE in the YouTube videos does the announcer ever say, "Fury. The story of a horse. . . and the boy who loved him."It's probably something like "Play it again, Sam", a TV myth.

This is from one of those very old-format TV sites set up in about the year 2000:

But the true star of the show was Fury himself. Known as Highland Dale when he lived on a farm in Missouri, he was 18 months old when he was discovered by well-known movie horse trainer Ralph McCutcheon who first used him in “Return of Wildfire” in ‘48. Series producer Leon Fromkess hired McCutcheon to deliver a horse for the series. By this time, McCutcheon had changed the horse’s name to Beauty (often called Beaut) and had worked him in “Lone Star” (‘52), “Johnny Guitar” (‘54) and “Gypsy Colt” (‘54). He was cast as the black stallion in “Giant” (‘56); and several other shows after “Fury” ended.

Can't find where I got this info, but Highland Dale was an American Saddlebred, long and rangy compared to the rather dinky Ed. Flicka was somewhere in the middle. William Shatner breeds Saddlebreds. Lesson for the day.

Elizabeth Taylor on Highland Dale/Fury was a sight to behold. His size can be gauged by how tiny she looks on him, almost like a girl. She was a magnificent horsewoman who did not need a double, not even in National Velvet when she was 13. I've tried to make a gif of my favorite scene from Giant, very poorly cropped for some reason (to avoid a letterbox effect, no doubt).

And that's all I can salvage of this post. I'm sorry, but I'll bet I feel a whole lot worse about it than you do.

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Monday, March 26, 2012

Mangled meaning: why it infuriates me!

It's the kind of word you don't usually say, or even hear, but it shows up in print journalism a lot, and (plenty) in books.

It's a word that is so consistently defined incorrectly, no one seems to know what it means at all any more. When that happens, when the tide of popular opinion is strong enough, slowly, surely, relentlessly, even ruthlessly, the (completely erroneous) "new" meaning of the word will drill and squeak its way into the dictionary and become "correct".

This means that the wrong definition, no matter how egregious, will suddenly be right. Orwell would recognize the irony.

Nonplussed. It's an odd sort of word that people pull out and use when they want to look or sound educated or highfalutin' (another interesting word). Almost always, it's used something like this:

"She was nonplussed when her boyfriend dumped her for a more attractive woman, for after all, he was a wretched shithead and she was about to dump him anyway."

"When the police raided her apartment, found 500 pounds of cocaine and slapped her in handcuffs, she was nonplussed: not only was the chief of police her best customer, he also had a taste for the white stuff."

In other words, in the public view, in almost everyone's view, nonplussed is supposed to mean nonchalant, cool, unruffled, unworried, unbothered, calm, composed, and all those things. "Nonplussed!" You know what I mean!

No, no, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Here is what the word nonplussed means. (By the way, this matches every other online dictionary definition I was able to find.)

non·plus(n

n-pl

)

tr.v. non·plussed also non·plused, non·plus·sing also non·plus·ing, non·plus·ses also non·plus·es

To put at a loss as to what to think, say, or do; bewilder.

n. A state of perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment

In other words, the exact opposite of the popular definition, the one everyone seems to have voted on in a secret ballot a few years ago.

Do you know what happens in cases like this? A writer will use the word nonplussed CORRECTLY in an article or (God help us) a non-fiction book or a novel, and an editor will take a big red pencil, cross the whole sentence out and write, "Wrong useage!" or "Get a dictionary!" or some-such comment in the margins. If not with a pencil, then electronically. The writer will be penalized and scolded for committing the unpardonable sin of wrong definition/useage, for what could be worse for a wordsmith than that?

Don't ask your editor to please please please look it up. They will be deeply offended by the very suggestion that they don't know their business, that in fact you know better than they do (unheard-of!), and the fragile bond between you will be frazzled, if not severed outright.

This is nasty stuff. Even if somehow-or-other your editor finds out you were right all along, he or she might say something along the lines of, "But people don't KNOW it means perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment. They think it means cool-headedness and detachment. If you use it this way you'll look like you're making a mistake and it will make us look bad." (That last part I added; they never say it out loud.)

How could people end up getting it so wrong, flipping the meaning around to its opposite? They see the prefix "non" and they think it means "not". "Plussed" somehow registers in their minds as "upset": but why? It has nothing to do with such things.

The expression comes from the Latin non plus, which literally means "no more". (And I'd be happy to see no more of this casual mangling of the English language.) No more is kind of neutral and a little hard to define, but if something is "non -" (-fat, -white, -sense), it obviously means "NOT". But if you're "not plussed", what are you? Not upset? Why does plussed mean upset? Doesn't "plus" just mean "more"? Yes. The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.

Why does this happen? How on earth can the meaning of a word flip over into its opposite? More to the point: why does this bother me so much? Because people do not think or question. They do what everyone else is doing: tribal mentality, so a sabre-tooth tiger won't eat them in the parking lot.

I can't get into all the other examples of mangled meaning because it's Monday morning and I'm already getting tired, but there's another one that irritates me so much that I must mention it here. As it turns out, it has not two but three parts, a trifecta of verbal carelessness.

I am continually hearing statements along the lines of, "The statistics on this subject simply do not jive with the facts." Yes, you heard me right.

So what does jive mean? It's a pretty cool word that refers to swing music, or the dance performed to such music (I've done it before, and it has nothing to do with statistics). Hey man, let's jive!

Jibe means to match up or line up or equal or be congruent with, which is where people get confused. Similar things do not dance together, though the image may be absurdly funny. But then there is another word that can jump into the confusing mix: gibe, meaning a nasty comment or a taunt.

So are we supposed to constantly stop what we're doing and look up words we're not sure about in an online dictionary? YES. If there is any doubt at all, DO IT. If your editor says "no, that's wrong," and you KNOW it is right, insist that he or she go to the dictionary and look it up.

Bother. Care. Take the time. Go out of your way. We're not living in caves any more and we won't be eaten if we don't follow the herd like cattle. Protest the casual mangling of language, even if you risk being criticized for getting it wrong (which you will). Words should not mean what we want them to mean. They mean what they mean. Am I a purist? About this? Fuck, yes!

I don't want to somehow get transported into the future and hear an unintelligible garble that used to pass for language. Yes, we somehow had to evolve from Chaucer to today's standard English, but I don't think people back then were casually crossing out meanings and changing them according to whim (or, more likely, popular opinion). In other words, for something as crucial and beautiful and powerful as language, there should be a standard, or how on earth are we ever going to communicate in a world that seems to be hurtling along at a billion miles an hour?

If a word means one thing to one person, and its exact opposite to the next person, what might that mean to detente?