"Where'd you get the gun, John?"

Rain fell on Skagit Valley. 

It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards. 

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. 

This quote is the kind-of-a-thing that makes writers wanna give up forever. It's the feverish vision of a strange sort of man, half Byron, half Donald Duck (and half Betty Boop, probably, though we don't know where that half is stashed).

I was trying to find the whole quote, because I know it goes on and on. So I found my punky-smelling, beige-paged copy of Tom Robbins' classic Another Roadside Attraction, and began to dig. After getting lost in the story a few times, I gave up, but I did find this:

The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of. . . 

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. Mercy. Mercy.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

This reminds me of nothing more than Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall: I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking/But I'll know my song well before I start singing. 

Why? Why all this? If you follow this strange, incoherent blog-about-nothing, you'll know about the cedar boughs outside my office window. They are vanes, omens, semaphores. They hang in three-dimensional layers, a sweet intimate bough that sweeps on my left side, a less-visible perpendicular wodge of green that doesn't want to talk to me, and behind all that, a backdrop of bush that just goes on and on.

We live in suburbia, but at night comes the trilling and squealing of shabby-looking pack animals, the kind that search around for garbage in the night. At first I thought I was going crazy with the sound. My husband, half-deef, couldn't even hear it. It was only much later that I found out what they were.

Anyway, this isn't about that.

Rain sweeps and drones in Vancouver, a close enough cousin to Skagit Valley to pass one of those primordial DNA tests (if only by a whisker). Yes. We have this too:

Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

Stop!

Pitiless, endless, suicidal, the rain takes up residence for some eight months of the year. No, twelve. Let's quit lying about this so we can go on living. As in northern Alberta, where I lived for many years, it can rain just like it can snow, any old time. In the middle of a grand day. It can split the merry blue sky like a railroad spike.

I like a storm. I love a storm when I am not in it. We don't get good hail around here (hail merry!), but in Alberta, once in a while a big satchelful of temporary diamonds would be dumped on the ground, and the air would hiss with ozone. The roof would thunder and dents would appear on the hoods of cars. Then a gleaming bounty lay on the ground, sublimating in sinuous vapors. Soon it'd just be that rice-paddy mush that's left over from a violent hunderstorm.

Here it's more temperate. Just a continuous pissing down on your dreams, a Monty Python foot crushing all ambition and hope.

I just realized something. Shakespeare bombed. He said something like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", then goes on blathering about "the darling buds of May". Doesn't the idjit know when summer starts? There's a meteorologist on CTV news who knows better than that. And he's not the most celebrated writer who ever lived.

What's my point? Jesus! it's wet, and grey, and discouraging out there. I won't tell you what I've been going through with my work lately. It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Something spectacular might happen, but at the same time, it might be the end of everything.

Or, as usual, I will just be left hanging and face the same indifference, the averted face and cold shoulder, that my mother presented to me when I was born.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

The universe doesn't care. It's indifferent. But why do people have to be? 

And what about my mother? My mother.

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads. 

They might as well be dead. 

If the rain comes, if the rain comes. 

When the sun shines they slip into the shade 

(When the sun shines down.) 

And sip their lemonade. 

(When the sun shines down.) 

When the sun shines, when the sun shines. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

I can show you that when it starts to rain, 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

Everything's the same. 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

I can show you, I can show you. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines, 

(When it Rains and shines.) 

It's just a state of mind? 

(When it Rains and shines)

Can you hear me, can you hear me? 

sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI. 

(Rain) 

niaR. 

(Rain) 

enihsnuS.

This makes me want to go on living!

Bentley the space alien

No - no - it can't be so

Why they cancelled the KKK

The Klan

by Alan Arkin and David Arkin, 1951

The countryside was cold and still There was a cross upon the hill This cold cross wore a burning hood To hide its rotten heart of wood Father I hear the iron sound Of hoofbeats on the frozen ground Down from the hills the riders came Jesus, it was a crying shame To see the blood upon their whips And hear the snarling of their lips Mother I feel a stabbing pain Blood flows down like a summer rain Now each one wore a mask of white To hide his cruel face from sight and each one sucks a little breath Out of the empty lungs of death Sister lift my bloody head It's so lonesome to be dead He who travels with the Klan He is a monster, not a man Underneath that white disguise I have looked into his eyes Brother, will you stand with me it's not easy to be free

I'd say I don't know why this song came into my head again, after something like 50 years, except that I DO know.

While I was watching the Scientology series on A & E (and I will confess to a total fascination with cults in every form), an ad came on - a weird, perhaps overdramatic but nonetheless chilling preview.  At first I thought it was for a dramatic series. Then came the title: Generation KKK. It depicted people in white robes with the ghastly pointed headpieces, holes cut for eyes, and the voiceovers were something like: no, the Klan is not dead, it's just moving into the next generation. Children were depicted hand-in-hand, standing around a big fire.

I felt queasy. If this was "real", why was A & E giving these people any air time? It seemed too horrible to be believed.

Then that was it. I didn't see anything more about it, and kind of hoped I'd imagined it.

But I hadn't.

Just yesterday, I saw a whole slew of news items about the series. A & E had been getting a lot of flak on social media for it, so they solved it by changing the title from Generation KKK to Escaping the KKK, to make it match up with Amish and Mennonite and all those other horrific organizations that lynch black people.

Uhhhhmmmm, yeah. 

Not so, as it turned out. The series has been abruptly cancelled. There are several stories about this. One is that the producers (demonized by A & E executives, who seemed to want to distance themselves from the whole thing) had been paying KKK leaders to do the show. Another, more suspicious, yet more believable rumour was that the KKK leaders were being paid to say and do whatever the producers wanted. Which was, according to those leaders, bullshit that did not reflect anything that actually went on.

Eye -yi-yi-yie.

If so, then A & E has sunk to new levels of depravity. Not only are they funding the KKK with their bribery, they're telling them exactly how to BE KKK members. Of course the actual Klan will try to play down their atrocities, while A & E will do the opposite, ramp it up to the maximum, because it "makes good television".

In any case, the show is canned, and the fallout is - we'll see. The problem with all this is that a lot of people will say, "Good for them! At last, someone in reality TV is showing a little moral fibre." But was the whole thing staged from the very start, to whip up curiosity for the NEXT "reality" show?

Had they begin filming on this already? Had they finished it?  I think it was all set to go to air. Let's hope someone will leak it onto YouTube so it can be poked with sharp sticks and ridiculed into the ground.

Meantime. . . the song. My brother Walt used to sing this during the folk boom, when everyone played guitars and sang, but then it sort of sank out of sight. It was hard to find the lyrics, and I found only ONE recorded version of it by Richie Havens. He turns it into a Richie Havens song, but it is the same one, believe me.

The Richie Havens lyrics were way different, by the way. So I had to dig some more to get to the bedrock.

The song was written by Alan and David Arkin (yes, THAT Alan Arkin, the actor). I don't know how many songs he wrote, if it was a sideline or what, and right now I feel like I've been run over, so I don't want to look it up. It was all wrong on message boards: people kept saying things like, oh, it was Malvina Reynolds, or Pete Seeger. It wasn't.

I don't know what inspired Alan Arkin and his father to write this, but if A & E can get everyone in a lather by faking a show about them, then the KKK supposedly have some sort of relevance beyond Birth of a Nation.  Of course there are supposed ties to Donald Trump. I would imagine they'd go for him more than for Hillary Clinton, but they'd elect a basset hound sooner than Hillary Clinton.

"Good evening."

Bentley finds the world's largest dust bunny

Christ on a cracker! This is huge

Heat: the end of everything

Haunted: the doll

Haunted: when it all goes dark

Haunted: the little girl in the woods

This is NOT what it's all about!

OK, so I just wrote about Canadian chocolate bars, and one of my favourites is Cadbury Crunchy. This has a very nice, thick layer of milk chocolate enrobing a crispy sponge toffee centre. Oh my! As a kid, I used to be able to buy the stuff in great cellophane-wrapped chunks in a candy store called May's in Chatham. I remember the atmosphere in there, sugary, fudgy, heavenly.

But over the years, sponge toffee became increasingly hard to find. Now the ONLY place that has it is the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and it's about $9.00 a bag. And it isn't even that good, too spongey, not crisp enough.

I had a dim memory of making this as a child (boiling up hot syrup. . . oh yeah, a great recipe for a kid!), but I don't know how it turned out. I swear I have this memory of running out into the back yard at night and sticking the pot into a snow drift so it would harden quickly, but now I think this must be wrong.

So I got this idea. Surely there would be a good recipe for sponge toffee (hokey pokey, cinder toffee, sea foam, yellow man, and about seven other names, unusual for a candy with three or four ingredients). There were DOZENS of them, but the one that interested me most was this effusive rendering by Nigella Lawson. She could make coffee grounds sound rhapsodic, I think, and her description of what she calls hokey pokey builds it up as some sort of heavenly concoction that practically makes itself.

Light. Crisp. Golden. So airy it almost disappears in your mouth. She even makes it for formal dinner parties, which to ME seems about as logical as bringing marshmallow Krispie squares. 

But in my case, hokey pokey/sponge toffee turned out to be a heavenly concoction that ended up in the garbage. THREE times.

It seemed easy, like all the recipes said, or at least simple. I was to find out, once again, that those two things are not the same at all.  All the recipes were similar - almost identical, in fact - white sugar, water, corn syrup, a little vanilla, then - at the end - "bicarb", as Nigella says in the video. Sounds like dumping bismuth in it, but what it is, is plain-ordinary baking soda. 

So I did that. It required an alarming amount, a whole tablespoonful, but I did it, I followed the recipe exactly.

I must've undercooked the syrup or something, because the first time it just didn't look like anything. It didn't foam way up as it was supposed to. It just lay there inert, and it never hardened. It was like a vast melted piece of toffee, a sugary glacier slowly making its way across the counter. Into the garbage it went.

Try #2 seemed more hopeful, it really did. I cooked it a little longer, just a little, mind. It turned the colour of all the sponge toffee syrup in all the recipes (in fact, quite a bit lighter than what is pictured above), and foamed way up when I added the bicarb, exactly the way it was supposed to. But there was this disturbing smell. Quite awful, really. Then I tasted it, and it was HORRIBLE. Scorched and inedible. Cinder toffee, indeed! It tasted like it had been scraped out of the fireplace, or something worse.

Once more, into the garbage.

The third time was going to be the charm. (This was all in one evening, by the way. I hate to lose.) And it did indeed seem perfect, with the syrup boiling up perfectly. It didn't foam up as much, but none of the recipes showed that anyway. It looked like the melted marshmallow you use for Rice Krispie squares. But I was afraid to stir it much and deflate it. I poured it out, it went sort of flat, but every other recipe showed it going flat.

Then - 

Finally it cooled and set. It was rock-hard, but that was the way it was supposed to be. I broke it up into pieces, and it had that honeycomb centre. I was truly anticipating a good result. But I got that sinking feeling once again. 

It tasted just awful, bitter and metallic, like a mouthful of baking soda. No one would want to eat this stuff! It's true that I do not own a candy thermometer, but that's for amateurs. Since the age of ten I have been making fudge from scratch, not that horrible condensed milk non-version, but the boiled-syrup kind that you beat with a spoon until it sets. I've had virtually no failures, so it's not as if I can't make candy. 

Every video I've seen - and it looks like there are a hundred of them - uses the same steps I used, same ingredients and method. Was the "bicarb" bad, somehow? CAN it go bad? Sugar can't go bad, can it? I'd had the syrup for a while. I don't know. 

Nigella, come to my house and make this heavenly stuff and wrap it up in cellophane and tie it with a ribbon. And DON'T charge $9.00 for it. My hankering for a candy from my past is still unsatisfied. And I'm tired of throwing out all those ingredients.

POST-TRAUMA. I feel bad. Just - chintzy bad. Not end-of-the-word bad, just - shabby. I feel as if I am a failure at something I thought I was good at, and I do NOT need one of those few, scant things taken away from me, thank you very much. I have scoured the internet, and I don't think anyone anywhere has had the same problems with this, a task I should be able to ace since I've made candy for I-don't-want-to-say-how-many years. Certainly no one has failed at it three times. 

And I still don't really know what the problem is. My impression is that there is about a five-second window for the syrup to be ready, and if you go over or under, you're screwed.

Either that, or other people enjoy a candy that has a bitter, metallic taste. A taste of cinders.

Please, someone tell me this is NOT "what it's all about".

POST-POST: I kept looking until I found something that made me feel better. It is my personal method for warding off depression.

There weren't that many, but I found a few tweets on the Nigella Twitter page, plus something that might be a partial explanation.

how do you judge when hokey pokey right. Too chewy too burnt prob

I tried making this quite a few times years ago from your recipe but never succeeded

thank you for tweeting this! I have had nothing but disaster trying to make it. Will buy new bicarb... :)

what's the best way to tackle it if the weather is damp?!

aha! The only recipe of yours that I have not managed to make work yet.

i have hokey pokey video on my pc and i watched this video more than 3oo hundred times does not taste good as it looks

I’ve missed something important here

The kitchen goddess speaks: "Generally if Hokey Pokey not working, it's because bicarbonate too old or weather is too damp!"

Hmmm. My "bicarbonate" (baking soda) is upwards of ten years old, but why should it matter? Why should that affect how cooked/uncooked the syrup is, or why it turns brown and tastes scorched? It has nothing to do with it. And the weather? Fair and cold. I really don't understand.

Post-script. Looking at Nigella without the sound on (as in the four-second gif, above) is a revelation. She constantly tosses and shakes her head (with its chestnut mane), her facial expressions are intense, even extreme, and she eyeballs and flirts incessantly with the camera, generally behaving in a way that wouldn't go over well at a dinner party, at all. I am sure she is not that effusive when she actually goes out - such exaggerated head motions and rolling-eyes glances are simply too much. She also does this I'm-an-attractive-woman-and-I-know-it thing that I find a little offputting. On the other side, my husband is in love with her.

POST-POST! This is one of those things that goes on forever. I did make a fourth attempt, which I was SURE was the charm. I bought new ingredients, new baking soda, even new SUGAR. I slavishly followed Nigella's stylish, effortless method. It went really well, actually! It looked good, boiled up nicely. Foamed up fairly violently when I added the reduced amount of "bicarb", but I whacked it out on the silicone platter and waited. Eating around the edges, it actually tasted good, crunchy, sweet. . . though there was that little aftertaste, bitter and metallic, that I tried to ignore. . .  

Then as it cooled and I broke it apart, my heart sank. It had that industrial smell to it, the scorched-earth quality that told me it had been ruined. And it had.

The above video - well, I don't want to laugh at it, but it makes me feel somewhat better, and I am VERY glad she posted it. I don't suppose anyone will take this as a warning about how dangerous this could be for children to try to make. The way it surges over the sides of the springform pan like a living thing, spurting jets of steam, an actual molten substance that could give you third-degree burns in less than a second - why does no one else warn you about this? It wouldn't even be like boiling water, as the liquid sugar lava would glue itself to your skin as it hardened.

I've made a couple of gifs of her result. And this is WITH a candy thermometer, set to the correct number of degrees:

In the second one, she's warning everyone to keep away from this thing, which does look like a science experiment gone wrong. I think the oozing and spurts of steam went on for several hours.

Nigella. Has this ever happened to you?

Post-POST-post: Now that I'm looking around on the topic, I am finding more and more admissions that this stuff is fiendishly hard to make. I suspect that at least one of my four attempts turned out the way it was supposed to: it just tasted like shit. Cinder toffee, indeed! They got the scorched, gritty part right. The husband of the poor woman who created the terrifying volcano in the above gifs said, "Get this out of the house. It smells like burnt carbon." 

I found this quote on a site called Life is a Party. She tried this recipe over and over again, but kept getting that horrible taste of scorched sugar. Finally she came out with a non-burnt batch, but it was flat and nearly devoid of bubbles. The result looked more like peanut brittle than sponge toffee, but her friends (no doubt not wanting to hurt her feelings) effused over it anyway: 

"After attempt number four I was starting to doubt myself. In fact I was thinking that after one full bottle of corn syrup and a bag of sugar that I should really be writing to you to save your time, and effort and invest the money for my four batches into a few Crunchie chocolate bars from the store -and if necessary rough them up a little, break them into pieces, tuck them into a cello bag with some ribbon and try to pass them off as your own to your friends and family."

ave tried to make this recipe twice. The first time it did not harden. Instead, it solidified into more of a "taffy" consistency. However, at least it tasted okay the first time. I was so determined to get it right that I bought a candy thermometer to ensure I reached the correct temperature. Then when I added the baking soda, the entire mixture nearly exploded into an unruly foam that almost burnt my hand!!! Luckily I was wearing The 'Ove' Glove (c) and I had my parchment paper right next to the stove ready-to-go. I didn't even get a chance to mix most of the baking soda in before it exploded. It smelled and tasted like a burnt marshmallow. Even worse, the baking soda had an aftertaste that made my mouth tingle for the next 20 min. It was disgusting and tasted like PURE CARBON! Believe me, I am very forgiving with new recipes but this was really, really bad. Btw, if anyone has children that like to help out in the kitchen, DO NOT COOK THIS RECIPE WITH THEM. IT COULD BE DANGEROUS!!! But don't worry, Food Network, I still love to watch Nigella Express.
But my favorite comment of all came from Nigella's page on the Food Network:

"I have tried to make this recipe twice. The first time it did not harden. Instead, it solidified into more of a "taffy" consistency. However, at least it tasted okay the first time. I was so determined to get it right that I bought a candy thermometer to ensure I reached the correct temperature. Then when I added the baking soda, the entire mixture nearly exploded into an unruly foam that almost burnt my hand!!! Luckily I was wearing The 'Ove' Glove (c) and I had my parchment paper right next to the stove ready-to-go. I didn't even get a chance to mix most of the baking soda in before it exploded. It smelled and tasted like a burnt marshmallow. Even worse, the baking soda had an aftertaste that made my mouth tingle for the next 20 min. It was disgusting and tasted like PURE CARBON! Believe me, I am very forgiving with new recipes but this was really, really bad. Btw, if anyone has children that like to help out in the kitchen, DO NOT COOK THIS RECIPE WITH THEM. IT COULD BE DANGEROUS!!! But don't worry, Food Network, I still love to watch Nigella Express."

Final Curtain:

Oh how I wish you could just go down to your corner store and buy a chunk of this, perfectly-made in big industrial batches, wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon. I think it cost ten cents.

Hilda in the waterfall

Is this my profile?

Yes, we ARE Canadian!

In these times of divisive political strife, resentment against the Machiavellian machinations of the monster soon to become U. S. President, and other things that are just a plain drag, man, my mind attempts to turn to other things.

Like chocolate bars.

The kind YOU guys don't have.

Never has it been more important for Canadians to cleave to a national identity. Almost by definition, a Canadian is "not an American": Robertson Davies once famously wrote, "Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution."

This either makes us a bunch of lily-livered cowards who don't know how to blow a redcoat's head off with a big musket, or - different.

We didn't so much run away from the Revolution as get up and walk until we found a good place to settle. No bloodshed, no battles or wars. Boring as hell, is Canadian history, but I'm proud of it.

"They think we live in a bunch of igloos," my husband rather bitterly said the other day, speaking of the genius executives who tried to make a go of Target stores across this country and failed utterly. Meaning, they had no idea at all of the spending habits of Canadians, and decided they would just take American spending habits (or what they saw as American spending habits) and ram them down our throats.

No thanks. Store by store, the Targets fell down (like. . . targets?), and, shockingly quickly, the company had to admit defeat and withdraw at a gigantic loss. They had misfired because they had misread the habits of the Canadian population so drastically.

Americans think we're funny, with moose wandering down the street (actually, that DOES happen sometimes), winter all year long, beavers in the back yard, saying "eh?" and "aboot" all the time (which, yes, does happen a lot). They think that instead of policemen, we have Mounties in red coats who ride horses. Well. . . sometimes they do, on ceremonial occasions, but the rest of the time they just look like cops.

But there are a few central facts Americans don't know, very simple ones that might help them understand what we are about.

Canada is only 150 years old. It's a young country, much younger than yours, Bucko! So it has had way less time to establish an identity. It has approximately 1/10 the population of the States, spread out over the second-largest land mass of any country in the world. (Only Russia is larger.) Meaning, there are concentrated blobs of population in a few key areas, with almost nothing in between.

This, too, affects our identity. 

We don't have states. We have ten provinces, plus the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and Nunavut. That all sounds very Northern, doesn't it. Plus our flag has a leaf on it and has only two colours. (And by the way, we only got our flag in 1965! Before that we used the British Union Jack and the hideous Red Ensign.) 

Our history is incredibly dull. Virtually no bloodshed, except that Quebecois stuff which has now died down to a dull roar. Quebec hasn't separated officially, but emotionally and spiritually it's a nation unto itself. So within our Little Big Country, we have ANOTHER Little Big Country with a culture all its own.

One thing, a party trick I like to do with Americans (after I've shown them our loonies and toonies and see-through plastic money) is tell them, "You know, I've never seen a gun."

"What? You mean you don't own any."

"No. I've never seen one. Ever. In my life. In fact, I don't know anyone - have never known anyone who has. Oh, except one. A cop."

Does that sound lame, America? Does that sound un-colourful? (Note the "u" which lingers in colourful, along with certain other words which have retained their British spelling.) Don't underestimate us.

You've never had our chocolate bars. 

And they are the finest in all the world.

We don't have "candy bars", by the way, just like we don't have "soda". It's POP, for your information. These things matter to us.

The chart at the beginning of this post pictures OUR chocolate bars, proudly Canadian, and many of which are now "vintage" (no longer made). Seeing this was like Proust's madeleine moment, when biting into a tiny cake released a flood of memory:

"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

(Caption: How do you like your coffee? 

CRISP! 

You like your coffee crisp? 

I like my Coffee Crisp!)

I was going to do a roundup or review of all these chocolate bars, one at a time, but there are so many of them. When I look at them now I feel simply overwhelmed. When you see or hear something you haven't even thought about for decades, it gives you a weird feeling. This is a phenomenon closely tied to the internet, social media, and nostalgia sites, which I haunt, dredging for meaning in the past and present.

Somebody will post a picture of something, and I'll think, my God, my God. . .I didn't think anybody else in the world remembered that! 

The most unusual of these was Neilson Treasures, which was really a mini-box of chocolates within a bar. No kidding, all sorts of different centres (note the spelling!): Turkish delight, bordeaux, chocolate, caramel, strawberry cream, and nougat. We had Sweet Marie, which was - well - yes, sort of like O Henry, but different somehow. Nicer name, for one thing. And Smarties: DON'T compare these to those waxy, tasteless M & Ms, please, because they are totally different, with a crunchy sugar shell and a milk chocolate melt factor that makes them ultra-superior.

Mackintosh's Toffee (good Canadian name, with a plaid wrapper) came in a bar, but you whacked it on something, kind of like Bonomo's Turkish Taffy, and it fractured into little pieces that warmed in your mouth, becoming deliciously chewy. I still buy this, but in wrapped kisses that have to be kept in the fridge. These have enough real butter in them that they won't keep for very long.

It's hard for me to believe that Americans don't have Aero and Caramilk and Coffee Crisp, but who knows? (The spelling of Aero might be changed to Arrow.) Crunchie has sponge toffee in it, but do Americans know what that is? Do they have it? The original recipe calls for boiling up a sugar syrup, throwing in some baking soda, running out in the back yard and jamming the pot into a snowdrift. Sounds like a Canadian thing to me.

Only some of these treats are obsolete. I had half a Crunchie with my coffee tonight. Half, because the bar is just too whacking BIG to eat in one sitting. Did the taste of it make me go all Proustian and madeleine-ish?

Not really, but I felt a certain melancholy. I keep thinking of that Joni Mitchell song about the fiddle and the drum, and the way she refers to "America, my friend". I don't hate Americans, but I am NOT friends with what is happening, because it seems evil. And I don't see how anyone can call that stupid, misogynistic jackass they elected "the answer" to anything. 

I just hope you guys, you know, survive the next four years, and for God's sake DON'T re-elect him. And don't try to come to Canada. You won't be able to. We have a strict immigration policy, you know?

I'll bet you didn't. 

50 gifts Canadians gave to the world!

Blow me down (please)!

Old, brown, crumbling things always interest me. (Don't take that too literally.) I am a great Popeye fan, I mean the original grotty old Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s. By wartime, it had all started to fall apart as Popeye (along with Donald Duck and most other well-known animated characters) began to spew propaganda for Our Side. But I had always had some dim awareness that he was based on a real person.

The cartoon Popeye, the comic strip I mean, was created by someone named Segar, and it had vastly more characters and was far weirder than the cartoon. The Sea Hag and Alice the Goon come to mind, as does someone named Ham Gravy. But when it came to the screen, the character was subtly altered. Ugly as Popeye was in the cartoons, he was uglier in the comic strip.

THIS Popeye does resemble that fellow, Frank Fiegel of Chester, though I haven't been able to find out much about him. (Stay tuned.)

Meantime, here are two early Popeye moments that stick in my head:

From that ultimate authority on everything, Wikipedia:

"Local folklore in Chester, Illinois, Segar's hometown, claims that Popeye is based on Frank "Rocky" Fiegel, a man who was handy with his fists. Fiegel was born on January 27, 1868. He lived as a bachelor his entire life. According to local Popeye historian Michael Brooks, Segar regularly sent money to Fiegel."

From that other site bearing Ultimate Knowledge, Cracked:

Find-a-Grave "A stone for me bones, heh-heh, a post for me ghost."

Fiegel was something of a local legend in Chester while Segar was growing up: He was known for always being prepared to dish out an ass whooping and taking on several opponents at the same time. He even acted exactly like Popeye -- locals claim that children would startle him while he napped and he would "jump out of his chair, arms flailing, ready for a fight." His official cause of death was "warships grew out of his biceps."

POST-POP. I just had one of those wretched experiences where most of my post just disappeared. I clicked on Revert to Draft and everything. But it's gone now, a few hundred words at least, and photographs and gifs.

Not sure whether it's worth trying to piece it back together, but I'd rather not lose a couple of hours like that. But do I want to lose ANOTHER couple of hours doing a salvage job?

But I must carry on.

As a kid, I particularly loved this Paramount logo at the end. It only appeared in the first half-dozen or so Popeyes, so it was something of a collector's item. (That desk calendar in the background - I still use those, though it is getting harder and harder to find refills. At Staples, they looked at me like I was crazy. I finally had to break down and order one online from Acco, and it still isn't here. Canada Post is extremely slow.)

When my own kids were pre-teens, they loved the old Popeyes (for some reason). They came on every day at 5:30 a.m., and I taped them. I even edited them so there were no repeats. The game we played was this: to try to freeze the tape on the inkwell, but I don't know if any of us did it. Or maybe once.

Those were rare times, maybe the best times of my life, though of course I didn't realize it until much later. Until, maybe, now. We were all so crazy about Popeye that we once acted out all the parts in Beware of Barnacle Bill. I had transcribed the entire libretto from the cartoon and made it into a script.

Is this dull? Sorry. It's dull for me, too. Have you ever had to piece together a whole post that disappeared? I'm so angry my hands are shaking, and at the same time I am extremely bored. 

Anyway, what's next in this now-pretty-dull story? At this point I had six hours of Popeye on a single videotape. But DVDs were just coming in, and I so wanted my precious cartoons in a more convenient format. So I mailed the tape off to one of those places that claimed to transcribe VHS to DVD for a very modest price.

I never saw the tape again. I felt bad about this for years.

Fast-forward, or maybe slow-forward, to 2007, when I was meandering around the Zellers store. The late, lost, lamented Zellers. And I saw something I could hardly believe:

YES! It was a DVD boxed set of SIXTY Popeye cartoons, in chronological order from the first one in 1933. They were in amazing condition, remastered and all that stuff, but not mucked-with. Much of it, particularly the beautifully-drawn silver-grey backgrounds, I was seeing for the first time. Then there was the amazing Fleischer technique of using a miniature set on a turntable to create a 3D effect. I've had this explained to me several times, but I still don't get it techically. To my understanding, the moving animation cels were filmed superimposed over the live-action background set, which was turning. Beats me how they did it.

I soon got my hands on the next two collections, but I noticed all the cartoons were in black and white. I was sure the ones I'd watched with my kids had been in colour. (The childhood ones, who knew - everything was in black and white back then.)

It took me a while to untwist this story. It turns out Ted Turner did it. He ruined these things, or almost did, by changing them into sickly pastel colours, pink and yellow and minty-green. I wonder whatever happened to the "colorization" movement, and why Ted Turner now heads up that so-called bunch of film purists, Turner Classic Movies. Why was he forgiven? Money talks, I guess. What a thug the man is. Anyway, this mistake was undone at some point. 

Probably lots of intrigue here, but I don't care about it because I have somehow managed to retrieve MOST of my lost post, if in flat, dull form. I hate blogging sometimes, but I hate losing posts even more.

I've been goosed!

I don't know why I've had this rather inane nursery rhyme repeating in my head lately. I don't know how it got started. I'm aware that most of these childish things have dark or even sinister origins, buried in antiquity somewhere.

I wondered if this one wasn't just a piece of nonsense, incongruous, like the wacky poems of Edward Lear or even Lewis Carroll. But no. The merest probing into Wikipedia brought up this:

Most historians believe that this rhyme refers to priest holes—hiding places for itinerant Catholic priests during the persecutions under King Henry VIII and later under Oliver Cromwell. Once discovered the priest would be forcibly taken from the house ('thrown down the stairs') and treated badly. Amateur historian Chris Roberts suggests further that the rhyme is linked to the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII.

Other interpretations exist. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey note in Birds Britannica that the greylag goose has for millennia been associated with fertility, that "goose" still has a sexual meaning in British culture, and that the nursery rhyme preserves these sexual overtones ("In my lady's chamber").

Priest holes! Sexual connotations! It doesn't quite hang together for me, but these things can evolve over time, or exist in layers. The original version didn't even have the throwing-down-the-stairs bit:

Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs and down stairs,
In my lady's chamber;
There you'll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger.

We won't even ask what a "race of ginger" is. It's just one of these obscure things. Some older versions include these even-sillier lines:

The stairs went crack,
He nearly broke his back.
And all the little ducks went,
'Quack, quack, quack'.

All that strange left-leg stuff ("so I took him by his left leg and threw him down the stairs") didn't seem to add up for me, until I suddenly remembered hearing the expression, "He kicks with his left foot." Just recalling that phrase jarred awake a synapse that hadn't fired since I was six and listening to my Grandmother quietly, politely eviscerate every Catholic in the neighborhood. The left foot is like the left leg or the left hand - sinister, half a bubble off plumb, "not the thing". In other words, to an observant Protestant - Catholic.

You have to ask yourself, however, why anyone would invent a children's rhyme about priest holes and the persecution of Catholics, those nasty old left-foot-kickers. Why would anyone throw in references to geese (ladies of the night) and ladies' chambers (implying high-status quarters not normally open to the goose trade)? There is Mother Goose, of course, just to complicate things. But if you really look at the structure of the rhyme, which absolutely no one does, you see that it can be interpreted entirely another way.

The narrator, the "I" who is reciting the rhyme, is actually addressing it to the goose character - asking it, in essence, "where should I go? It's kind of like "hey, you over there - yes, I mean YOU, Goosey Goosey Gander - what's a-happenin'?" But it's definitely not "Here I am, Goosey Goosey Gander, Esquire, and let me tell you all about my lady's chamber." This is in spite of the fact that every illustration I've ever seen for this thing includes a big, nasty goose, usually throwing a man down the stairs.

 In fact, "Goosey Goosey Gander" might just be a collection of nonsense syllables, a blithery-blathery-tra-la-lee sort of thing.

If you take the goose right out of the equation (and that's no fun, because I love these depictions of savage geese throwing terrified men down the stairs), then you have something like this:

Dinder, dander, donder
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs, downstairs,
In my lady's chamber.

When you look at it this way, it can and does have erotic possibilities. Hmmm, let's see, where am I going to wander? (wandering being a sort of aimless idling, or even a poking-around-in-none-of-your-business thing). Maybe up here, maybe down there (whew - now that has some sexual meaning behind it!), or maybe in my lady's chamber, where I certainly do NOT belong. It has a sort of subtext of invaded intimacy.

The old man who wouldn't say his prayers kind of reminds me of the old rhyme about "I met a man who wasn't there". In any case, is it really the goose who does the "throwing down the stairs" bit? Of course not; it's the narrator of the poem. So maybe it's really by that notorious old Catholic-hater, Henry VIII. Who knows, he wrote a lot of songs, such as Greensleeves. Or maybe Anne Boleyn wrote it for something to do in the Tower before she got chopped.