Scary little Christmas: violence on the puppet stage

This has to rate, if it rates at all, as the most violent thing I've ever seen on a puppet stage. It's shocking not just for its casual and gratuitous violence, but for the stunned looks on the faces of the kiddie audience, held captive by the most un-jolly Santa I've ever seen. Most Santas just don't have it down, in particular the laugh: it comes out ha-ha-ha, or, as in this case, an evil little chuckle. There are moments when this guy is lecturing the kids in which his gestures are like something from the movie Downfall.  But that's nothing compared to the puppets, who rip into each other with heartless, sociopathic glee. There is a very fake soundtrack of forced children's laughter layered on top, which does not match the help-me/get-me-out-of-here faces of the kids at all.

There is no shorter version of this that I could find, or I'd post it. Eight minutes is just too much of your life to waste on something like this. And yet, it's fascinating. Here Santa is the ultimate authority figure. You WILL watch this puppet show, and you will like it.

Snowflakes

The clown that haunts my dreams

In the past I've spilled quite a lot of ink on Milky. Well, not literally, or his suit would be all splotchy. The Milkster was the creature who haunted my childhood from his roost on Detroit TV during the early 1960s. Everyone was supposed to love Milky, and the thing is, we did, no matter how freakish he looked. Clowns weren't viewed as creepy then, nor were dolls or puppets, which explains a lot about children's Christmas programming back then.

I hesitated on doing one of these giffer things about Milky, because all my photos of him were so shitty. Some of them were about the size of a postage stamp, but that's all I had.  A few were gi-normous scans of ads that look like they appeared in newspapers, since they have that yellowed, crumbling look. So I had to try to scale those down to fit.

Everything IN this montage is yellowed, when it isn't red, the waxy red of Twin Pines milk cartons. The stylized cartoon version of Milky is even more nightmarish than the original. Then there is the Milky merchandizing, which makes up most of this tribute because it's all I have. God, but it was awful. Those tshirts look like they're rotten, the wall clock is the color of a bad urine sample, that game is a shitty piece of plastic - but none of them can hold a candle to the ultimate piece of Milky memorabilia:

Yes. It's the Milky the Clown ash tray. 

BONUS FIND!  Who knows how I get into these nightmarish things. I just found an ad for a complete set of brand new, unopened, unused, pristine drinking glasses WITH MILKY ON THEM. You heard me. God knows how much they want for these things, because they are up for auction somewhere in the States. Compared to the plastic tumbler, they're pretty impressive:

One wonders, however, who would buy a set of these and just put them away somewhere. A time traveller, perhaps. Someone from the future who could see how valuable these were going to be. But I have never understood time travel. What if you met yourself? What if you gave yourself all sorts of advice about things NOT to do, so you would end up not having any of the learning experiences of your life and would end up a complete idiot? How could there be two of you at one time? But there would have to be, wouldn't there? Yet, my Einsteinian husband says time travel is theoretically possible. The whole thing makes me want to go to bed and stay there.

My cat Bentley: moods

The Lost Harold Lloyd

I am always wildly excited to find "new" photos from the lost Harold Lloyd movie, Professor Beware. I call it lost because it's. . . lost. Nobody knows where it is. I have even consulted with people who knew Harold personally, and they don't know either, and don't want to talk about it. Is something going on here?

I've found a lot of promotional stills, "lobby cards" and posters for Professor Beware, but nobody knows if it still exists anywhere. There is a rumour that it was shown - once - on American Movie Channel, or perhaps Turner Classics. But what happened to it after that?

There are big handsome movie posters like this one, and such-like, but no MOVIE. This is odd. It is said Harold didn't like the movie very much, having done not-so-well with his first couple of talkies. Did he decide to withdraw it, to destroy the negative? But Harold was the kind of person who kept everything.

This is a scene where he gets very wet, and we get to see, at last, how curly his hair really was. It was always slicked back, like men's hair was back then. He looks so painfully cute here, I honestly can't bear it.

I like his pained, bewildered, baffled expression here. Though I know almost nothing about this movie, the stills seem to portray him as slapping himself on the forehead with dismay. Dismay was always one of his better modes of existence.

I mean, how provocative can it get: "Egyptologist in Strip Tease". An unlikely headline. Here Harold looks uncannily like Clark Kent, which is funny because Clark Kent was originally modelled on Harold Lloyd.

This is what I mean about the forehead-slapping. God! he is adorable.

Another underwear shot.

Don't ask me to explain these! Perhaps we are meant just to look upon them, like the Burning Bush, and not ask questions about them.

Note the right hand, which isn't really a hand. It's a prosthetic glove, fashioned after Harold lost his thumb and forefinger in an explosion. This one looks much more lifelike than the primitive ones he first wore in 1919.

But unless someone finds a copy moldering away in some Paramount vault, I'll never get to see this movie. Its very rarity, scarcity, impossibility, is what makes it so utterly irresistible.

Scary little Christmas: The Snowman

Now this one is truly terrifying. This snowman morphs into something bordering on the Satanic. The accompanying text has a warning: "This ain't Frosty." It's not for kids under the age of twelve.

Vacation from hell: can you top this?

(Please note: I lay no claim to this, except to say it's freakin' great. I include a link to the original piece at the end. Maybe this is not the way to do it. Probably not. But it's not going viral, folks, I'm lucky to get 18 views some days, and 16 of them are mine, so I hope I can "quote" this without getting into trouble. Anyway, it kicks ass.)

Greetings from Hell (A.K.A. Maui)

Grant Lawrence — Westender

  

Maui in December: Sounds awesome, right? But if it’s your friend / co-worker / neighbour / frienemy who’s taking the holiday, and boasting nonstop about it on social media while you shiver here in Vancouver, it can be more than a little annoying.

Well, here’s the flipside, for those of you with a taste for some sweet schadenfreude. Imagine, if you will, saving up for a Maui vacation for two years, booking the trip back in January, and making it extra special by taking three generations of family.

Now imagine being woken up by your jetlagged kids at 5:20am Hawaii time, then pulling back the curtains on the lanai to groggily stare out at palm trees bending in hurricane-force winds against a charcoal sky as sheets of rain pelt the windows. Then pretend you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when it happens the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.

If you can conjure such a thing, you’ll have a pretty good feel for our recent family vacation. Go ahead and revel in our bank-breaking sogginess, but you have to admit: There’s something downright cruel about Vancouverites spending thousands of dollars to fly 4,356 kilometres to escape the rain, only to arrive to much more of it.

Hey, we made the best of it. What choice did we have? Stay in the hotel room all day? I did that on a vacation in the Dominican Republic when, again, it rained the whole time. I ended up watching a five-day-marathon of Little House on the Prairie in Spanish.

The hot tub at our hotel was still fun in the rain. We even met someone in the tub who voted for Trump. She was very anti-Obama, saying, “Who is Obama, anyway? I mean, where does he even come from?” My wife responded, “Um… Hawaii, actually,” which was followed by the Trump supporter’s stunned silence.

Just as the weather was finally starting to clear up, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota arrived in the suite above us. Oddly, they kept their curtains drawn tight all day, emerging only at night. They were loud talkers, but we didn’t think much of it – that is, until the man, who resembled cartoonist Robert Crumb, got absolutely and repeatedly wasted. Drunk as a skunk, he’d slur abusive remarks at his wife at the top of his lungs, then beg for sex and “a baby,” all the while flicking his Marlboro butts down onto our lanai (in a non-smoking resort). His lunatic ravings and smashing and banging went on all night long, which thoroughly freaked us out: I barricaded the doors and my 11-year-old nephew cried. It was like a cross between National Lampoon’s Vacation and Cape Fear. When the couple finally checked out a few days later (after repeated run-ins with security), we were shocked to learn they were on their honeymoon.

My sister finally had enough of it, treating her family to a one-night stay in a big, fancy resort a little further south, in what is typically the sunnier part of Maui. Except it poured there, too, and the hotel’s deluxe pool was closed due to a Code Brown (that’s resort-speak for a kid taking a dump in the pool.) But their room had a lovely view of a gigantic construction site.

We did eventually manage to capture the “Aloha spirit” of the islands, and it was the time spent with each other that mattered most: snorkeling with my 15-year-old nephew, a sunset dinner with Mom, watching the cousins play in the sand, and hearing my 11-month-old daughter say “Mama” for the first time. All that, and listening to my three-year-old yelling, “It’s raining AGAIN?”

http://www.westender.com/news-issues/vancouver-shakedown/greetings-from-hell-a-k-a-maui-1.4327072

CODA. Do YOU have a vacation-from-hell story you'd like to see on this very blog? Didn't think so. I mean, if you have one, please send it to me, but somehow it doesn't seem likely. I don't get much response to this blog, though I am grateful for every scrap I get. No, I mean it!

My own vacation from hell came after the worst bout of flu I had ever experienced. I woke up in the night with such a high fever that I was afraid I would die. I had to crawl to the bathroom on my hands and knees to get the thermometer. My temperature was just under 105 degrees. The thermometer felt hot, like it had been dipped in boiling water. I kept thinking, bizarrely, of those cartoons where the mercury climbs and climbs until it bursts out the end.

I crawled into a tub full of cold water, afraid I would have convulsions. My husband was out of town and couldn't help me. I was just barely recovered - still felt shaky and had lost ten pounds - when it was time to go on our deluxe dream vacation to Hawaii - yes, Hawaii!, but everyone said, don't worry, you'll be fine once you get there.

I was not fine once I got there. At all. I was in agonizing pain all night, every night, for reasons I could not fathom, and barely slept. My legs felt like they were stuck in a fire. When someone describes a pain as "searing", I know just what that means. They jerked and twitched incessantly, and hurt insanely no matter what I did: heat, cold, moving, not moving, drugs, not drugs. All we had was Tylenol, and it didn't even put a dent in the pain.

Desperate for relief and sleep, I went to clinic after clinic, and they said helpful things like, "Just stretch your legs out like this. No?"  My husband went out in the middle of the night, lied in an Emergency room and said he needed codeine for his old football injury. They gave it to him. (This was a long time ago.)

The codeine also didn't put a dent in the pain. Towards dawn, the agony would fade to jelly-kneed weakness, but I still couldn't sleep. At all. I couldn't nap. I could barely walk. I was fried.

That was my holiday. I vaguely remember listening to Hawaiian public radio while lying in a codeine stupor. Finally we found a real doctor who said, "This isn't flu. I don't know what it is. You picked up a virus somewhere, a bad one. Maybe on the plane. Your immune system was wiped out, so it got its hooks in you." Or words to that effect.

By then it was time to go home, and I did not see how I would survive the flight, cope with the airport, or any of it. The real doctor gave me some drugs, something like oxycodone, and I took half a tablet and went into a coma. My husband had to push me in a wheelchair at the airport, and help me on to the plane like an invalid.

But I remember that the weather was nice.

Coda to the coda. I did go to my doctor after the trip to try to find out what the fuck happened to me. She said she didn't know what it was either. Ah, medicine! How is it that I keep hearing about all these modern miracles, such as head transplants (which are now a reality: so please, PLEASE can I have a new head now?), when doctors seem to do nothing except frown and say, "Uhmmmm -"

But something very weird happened. I was supposed to give a urine sample, a useless thing they do to keep patients busy and make it seem as if something is happening, and I was utterly shocked. My pee sample was dark brown. It looked like sludge. I asked my doctor about it and she said it was "normal". But what sort of tests did they do? This wasn't excess creatinine, folks, it was some sort of curse-of-the-volcano thing. It was a question left hanging. I never had anything like that happen to me again.

The many Matts

Even if he did call my novel "forgotten" (which it IS, damn it) in one of his columns. Oh well. I don't know if I could've gotten that novel written without his support.

Do you think I'm on a kick here with these giffy-slide-show-type-things? Could be. Takes up less room, anyway.

Bentley's Christmas

Bentley is a Christmas kind of guy. Just tonight I caught him skulking around under the Christmas tree. When I tried to take a picture of him, he lunged at me, but it was a friendly lunge.

The gangsta look suits Bentley just fine. 

Scary Christmas!

Bentley roasting by an open fire.

Is. . .is there a cat in there somewhere?

A Christmas cuddle.

Bentley has brought me so much joy!

Why Ryan is such an awesome kid!

For one thing, he plays a trombone that's bigger than he is. He could've played clarinet in band - even a trumpet - saxophone, those are cool - but no. It had to be trombone.

Playing an instrument like this is hazardous. Musicians are vulnerable to certain kinds of injuries, and this one was particularly painful. While putting his instrument together, his hand was literally pinched in the slide, necessitating a trip to Emergency. There was just one problem. . . his Taekwondo red belt test was in a couple of days. Obviously he'd have to cancel. This is a very big deal because the whole class takes the test together, and it's a rite of passage for them.

But let's not forget, this is Ryan, the Taekwondo Kid! Here he is ace-ing his test, a private test as it turned out, making it much more dramatic (and filmable - you usually can't pick them out of the herd). It has a sort of Karate Kid/Pat Morita/wax-on-wax-off vibe to it.

Breaking the board. And overcoming considerable adversity at the same time. So bow to the new red belt champion. Way to go, Ry!

And here he is getting ready to play his trombone at the school Christmas concert. 

Special bonus gif: Ryan singing in the choir.