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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Resurrection

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!)

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!

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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

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.)

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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.

Attached to one of these sites was a stanza about Melvin Monkey, whom I don't remember very well. Were these ads censored for some reason? Ye gods.

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 Melvin Monkey today,

let’s hear what Melvin has to say:

“My mummy says I should realize

That monkeys all need exercise,

But teeth need exercising too

And my mum makes it fun to do,

For when I swing she gives me some

Delicious WRIGLEY’s SPEARMINT GUM

It helps to keep teeth clean and bright

And never spoils my appetite.

My mum’s my favourite swinging chum,

We both like Wrigley’s spearmint gum. “

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Happiness

The original Ice Bucket Challenge

She's got a ticket to ride (and she don't care)

It was torture for me not to share all 17 minutes of the original Live at Blackpool video, but I know (from my own experience) that people will bail on it if it's that long. So I present the core of it, featuring the phenomenal sound I call "JohnPaul". John's vocals tear my heart out, and Paul's sweetness compliments them perfectly. This stuff still makes my hair stand on end. This band is better onstage, never lip-synchs, very tight. They deserved every minute of their fame and were full of transportive magic. And Sir Paul is still out there, carrying it on. . .

I just thought of something I love, a Paul interview - they asked him, "What about all those people who say the White Album should have been edited down to one really good record?" He said:

 “It’s great, it sold, it’s the bloody Beatles White Album– shut up!”

Something truly wonderful

This is probably my fourth post today, but it simply had to be. Today I got something in the mail, a paper-something, the old-fashioned way. It had flown through the air via airmail, all the way from Britain. I knew Kevin Brownlow was going to send me something because he told me, after my last email about his Tramp and the Dictator (brilliant) documentary. I also mentioned the short story about Valentino I wrote as a kid, and the book The Movies (which I will soon see again for the first time in some 45 years - !).

What he sent me along with his lovely letter - you can hear his whimsy and friendliness in his writing, and it is as balm on a stinging wound - is nothing short of a treasure, an old yellowed, lacquered post card with Valentino on it. Obviously vintage. On the back, though, is something that looks almost like ghostly writing, or ink that has vastly faded with time.

So the rewards don't come when or where you think they will. But when you are afraid they won't come at all, something like this happens. Something wonderful.

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Thoughts on a taboo subject

http://www.laweekly.com/2010-08-19/news/mike-penner-christine-daniels-a-tragic-love-story/

This is one of the better pieces I've read on the complex, thorny, politically- and socially-charged issue of gender identity, which is  (as far as I am concerned) impossible to untangle from human identity. In this case, in spite of a valiant effort, it all went disastrously wrong. I believe the current prevailing attitude is to believe that if a person is unhappy with their birth gender, transitioning will help them be "who they really are", and as a result, much happier and more fulfilled. If a person's experience does not fit this preconceived idea, everyone gets very uncomfortable.

In this case, Christine Daniels gleefully embraced a lifestyle that seemed more like that of a drag queen playing a role, "going as" Christine rather than actually being her. But the internal conflict was brutal and never resolved, and she committed suicide before even reaching a truce. Myself, I often wonder why women's identity seems so bound up in hair extensions, makeup and stilettos, all the trappings that social pressure demands must be done as perfectly as possible. To "pass" (a rather shocking word used in this piece), you have to get everything right.

As for myself, and most of the women I know, we don't feel that pressure, at least not in midlife. It's not that we're slobs. The inside may well match the outside, however, if the inside isn't shallow and vain and obsessed with appearances. And here I talk of the popular culture at large, the whole Kardashian monstrosity of instant celebrity/rampant narcissism. 

The piece is dated, in some ways surprisingly so, though it's only a few years old. It speaks of emails as magic portals, and whole newspaper blogs can be wiped clean from archives (and I can't help but think my son could go over there and retrieve them, just as he did mine). There is no social media. At all. I'm not convinced it would have helped. I did stumble across another provocative, taboo statement from a plastic surgeon who has stopped doing gender reassignment surgery because from what he has observed, people are no happier post-surgery than they were before. But again, that's something we just don't say.

In digging into all this, I found statements to the effect that only a microscopic proportion of transgendered people ever feel any regret about their decision, maybe 1/10 of 1%. Then another article says no statistics have ever been kept. How to set up such a study, then, when everyone is so uncomfortable even with the idea? I'm not saying "study transgender regret so people will stop having sex changes" - I'm not Archie Bunker. I'm saying that whenever I see fog or a dense curtain, I have an overwhelming desire to see what's behind it. Knowledge is the only way to clarity. There is just so much we don't yet know. 

Other things float to the surface. There used to be a regulation that a candidate live as the opposite sex for two years before undergoing surgery. Then it was one year. Now it's down to six months. Hey, I'm not saying "don't transition," I'm just saying don't keep accelerating the whole process at the speed of light (typical of our "no waiting" mentality with its microscopic attention span) until it's down to nothing. My feeling is that it would be crucial for a candidate to have a substantial span of time to feel out what it's like, really like, the good, the bad and the indifferent, especially with regards to existing relationships.

I don't know about any of this because I haven't been through it. But I can talk about gender, see, because I seem to have one. I don't want to be male, though there are days when being female, particularly an older female, is kind of a drag (if you'll pardon the expression). Though I love being a grandma, and I like men's bodies if they're nice ones, and I really love the way men smell (especially good-smelling ones), making me "traditionally female" in some people's books, I refuse all molds and categories. Throughout my life, most of my close friends have been men (some of them even gay! Shrieks of horror!), I love looking at photos of women in Victorian gowns which might be seen as gay-ish (but I don't care, and even cherish it), and for the most part, I identify not as male or female, nor even androgynous, but human.

I do wonder however, whenever I delve into this subject, particularly with MTF transition, why there is such a tremendous emphasis on appearance. There are even  schools where the transitioning can learn how to act like women, how to walk and talk and speak like a proper lady rather than a flower girl (so to speak). It's real finishing-school stuff, which fork to use, balancing a book on your head, etc. Amazes and dismays me that we focus on something so relatively shallow. I'd flunk that course for sure. If anyone tried to show me "how to act like a woman", I'd bite them. Where it hurts. 

Post-script. When I first saw Cabaret in 1973, I had a thing for Joel Grey. An obsession. Not so much with him as with his character. He was simply gorgeous. He was sexy. He was manwoman, not really womanly or female, but still flouting masculinity, turning it on its ear. I was kind of ashamed of this at the time, until I went on the internet a million years later and read all these blog posts saying, "I want to fuck Joel Grey." Specifically, Joel Grey as the emcee, dolled up in lurid makeup. Grey is still around, though looking and sounding fragile, and has mostly been a Broadway baby, a stage actor and "triple threat". When I recently watched a clip of him dancing in the musical George M!, my face fell off. He was incredibly good, actually better than James Cagney. I also recall his turn in Dancer in the Dark with Bjork, leaping up on a table to tap-dance when he was 65 or something (oh, I must find that clip!). But the emcee character was all about androgyny that wasn't feminine. He was edgy and fierce, a bantam rooster (even crowing over a pile of mock-dead bodies in a mud-wrestling ring). I still get that feeling when I see him. Excuse me.

POST-BLOG-POST BLOG POST: (or something). Yes, I've furthermore found just tons of stuff on this, and it is alarming. I think it's an example of activism at its worst, starting off with a clear purpose and even good intentions, then snowballing into an alarming imperative of "we-think" (and there is nothing more deadly than "we-think", because "we" lose our individuality), eventually forcing conformity to new and equally soul-destroying norms. 

In other words, if anybody in the "transgender community" bails, reverses, detransitions, or just desires to sort out their own human complexity in some new and less-entrenched way, they are not just ostracized but attacked. Meantime the "detransitioners" (awful terms, sorry) are beginning to point out that the medical establishment, the new, cool, socially-enlightened medical establishment (you know, the one that doesn't exist) has been a major force behind a lot of current thinking about gender reassignment and the "surgical cure". It's getting easier and faster all the time to get this shit done, which means there's not much time for changing your mind.

Am I the only one that gets queasy about all this? News stories are presented with soft-focus light and tender music, depicting Jesse, a 5-year-old boy who knows he's a girl because he plays with Barbies rather than trucks. (No kidding, it all comes down to that. If we are what we play with, then I guess I must be a pail of frogs.)

Then we hear that Jessica's parents (they're calling him Jessica now) plan to give him hormone-blockers to suppress male puberty, just so's he'll be more comfortable with himself as he slowly turns into a . . . girl?

It pushes us all, I think, into deep and spooky realms. Who are we? What's male, what's female, besides our anatomy which sometimes seems crucial (when having a baby, for example), and sometimes utterly irrelevant? Why is it so hard to get past, if it isn't that big a deal? 

But maybe it IS that big a deal.

I haven't failed to notice, in the many stories I've recently read, that when a confused, pain-filled man rushes to embrace a new female identity, there's a rash of facial plastic surgery with the usual bizarre, puffy-lipped, ping-pong-cheeked results, followed by photo-shoots of the New Woman wrapped in tight leopardskin and sprawling on the floor with a provocative expression and fuck-me shoes. Her hair, the new hair, the extremely perfect salon hair styled to look casual, wafts gently back in an electric-fan breeze. This is somebody's idea of a woman, and my idea of a "what??"

Dismays me, is all. Dismays me that people who insist they are really women inside have to go through such a meat grinder to pass inspection. Please! These are cartoons.

(Just a kicker at the end. Under the heading "victories" on the sexchangeregret.com site is this strange message from "Robert John". It appears that lurking behind this supposed attempt to unmask an uncomfortable truth is an even more uncomfortable truth - fundamentalist Christianity. It's mentioned nowhere else on the site.)

I had irreversible gender reassignment surgery in 1997 absolutely convinced I was a woman
in a man's body. I anticipated living happily ever after, however I had persistent difficulties
and fell into deep depression. I began reading the Bible, unsatisfied with superficial
proclamations of diversity, inclusiveness, and tolerance. I happened upon King David's
famous repentance Psalm 51 and discovered, like David, I could be forgiven for all my sins.
I also learned God chastens those whom He loves and I was being guided to seek
repentance, and faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. I knew identifying as a woman
was not living in truth, and returned to my given names and birth gender without further
surgery. My victory has come by allowing the Lord in my heart, becoming God-focused instead of self-centered, and am thankful for my birth sex and many blessings. despite the
consequences and challenges. God has led me to witness His truth and love, and I can
testify: indeed, God's grace, mercy and truth do set one free.
God bless,
Robert John

Grieg - Peace of the woods