It's here, it's here - faith and begorrah - it's THE GLASS CHARACTER!

Today, on St. Patrick's Day, not one but TWO parcels came to my door!

Gee, it's full of paper! What can it be?

OMG, the cover is green. . . 

Yes. . . it's Harold at last!

Is it all there? Of course it is!

Together at last.

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Just in time for St. Patrick's Day: FINIAN'S RAINBOW MEATS!

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Best restaurant review I ever read

“I think it closed”

Review of Pane Caldo

72 E Walton St, Chicago, IL 60611-1420 (Gold Coast)

312-649-0055

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Ranked #2,429 of 8,187 restaurants in Chicago

30 Reviews

Price range: CAD 46 - CAD 89

Cuisines: Dessert, Italian

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30 reviews from our community

56% Recommend

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10
Very good

7
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7
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3
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3

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George A

Vero Beach, Florida

Top Contributor

 105 reviews

 76 restaurant reviews

 Reviews in 32 cities

 64 helpful votes

“I think it closed”

Reviewed 5 November 2012

I believe it is closed, and was a good place when it was open, a well-located good Italian restaurant. I tried to book a table last week and no answer

• Visited November 2012
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Kitsch from the Bitsch

It's oh so late, I am bloody tired, but this is when I do my major blogging. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been to try to set up the launch of my Harold Lloyd book. It just isn't coming together, and now I realize it's been ten years since I've even done one of these! Never mind, let's bury ourselves in some enjoyable imagery from one of my fave FB pages, The Kitsch Bitsch.

Strange woman in bra and girdle talking on a lot of blue phones at the same time. Oh, those cords.

I don't know about the food on this page. It's almost like the dog had an accident on the rug. Nearly everything is jellied, held in suspension and quivering. This has a little moat in the middle, holding the Lord knows what. So long as it isn't moving.

As the immortal KB says, you can't make this stuff up. I devoted a whole previous post to the Munsingwear men, gleefully bantering back and forth about the state of their underwear. These undies look sort of like girdles and feature the patented "stretchy seat" that these fellows just love to dish about. Munsingwear also patented the kangaroo-pouch fly, which I can't look at for very long if it's on a certain kind of guy, because my body just sort of does this "thing" all by itself. Some sort of primitive reflex, no doubt. A hangover from my reproductive years.  Ye gods. . . time for bed. . .

https://www.facebook.com/thekitschbitsch

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This coffee made my brain explode!

Usually you can't copy and paste gifs from online articles, but for some reason these worked. It was an article about the effects of caffeine on the brain, and the illustrations moved, wiggled. This one, if you really look at it, is kind of disgusting, though it's something we all do many times a day.

Now here is an interesting thing: brain as neon sign. Before you have your coffee in the morning, your brain is, well, sort of greeny and dull red. After you have your coffee in the morning, it turns blue. And kind of black. I have never seen the inside of my brain, which I know is defective anyway, so I can't say for sure this is accurate.

This one's way cute. Little brown coffee beans are throwing things up in the air, things that look sort of like tiny Milk Bone dog biscuits (which, as a kid, I used to eat).  I know about caffeine, though I have to strictly limit my intake of it to keep from flipping into hypomania, but adenosine? Sounds like an ingredient of a household cleaner or the byproduct of a lab experiment gone wrong. Harsh.

Now we KNOW adenosine isn't a good thing, because it's full of spiders. Not only that, we seem to be looking at the insides of a twitching, jerking frog. Maybe this is a vivisection. But it ain't very attractive.

Quite simply, this is disgusting. I feel like I'm watching a remake of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum. And what are those two little chocolate things on the fly's face? Deformed frogs? This is a still picture rather than a gif, and it's just as well, for if this started wriggling and squirming I'd feel pretty sick.

I feel an attack of Ricardo Montalban coming on. Pre-Wrath of Khan, he moved a lot of Maxwell House. He had that smoooooooooth voice. It made you want to drink some. "Arabicas!" I look forward to the day when your Facebook profile picture can be animated like this. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!

Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!

Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself. 

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?

So the name itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. "Mentally ill" is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.

I hate stigma. I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away. 

"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.  

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"?  Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the 'poor soul" attitude that prevails?

But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior". 

One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.

Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark.  I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?

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Bursting Blings and Beta: the lost art of the basement tape

The past swims before my eyes. Or rather lurches and jostles, violently, in violet colors, with that grainy, almost sparkling lower frame which is the telltale sign of the 30-year-old Beta-format videotape. Something happens to these tapes when allowed to stew in their own nitrates in somebody's basement for two or three decades. A chemical change comes over them - an alchemy - and like a good friend going through a bad divorce, they come out Different. They go bad, actually, denature and denitrate (though they're probably not made of nitrate at all but some cheap acetate like a whore's stocking), but in some brilliant way they also spring into unique works of moving art. Thus Rich Correll, as he forever bounds on to the stage with his gigantic Citizen-Kane-sized name in lights, seems to strobe jubilantly as he saunters towards the towering structure that is the Squares, his appearance evanescent, almost incandescent as the Beta tape catches that fleeting second, that instant in time which is the Hollywood Squares Leave it to Beaver Day.

And here, a brilliantly-striped, strobing Rich sounds forth on something, the contents of which we will never know, but how beautifully he does it, in his violet/magenta/chartreuse/indigo tones interspersed with gaudy flashes of carmine. Beyond graininess or distortion, this thing has just gone all to hell with color, a striated peacock-tail of almost indecent hue, as if the colors were leaping and strobing right out of Rich Correlll's own creative head as he sits in that square behind his name. I wish there were some sort of magic crayon or acrylic or whatever that would paint in jostling, violently jiggling multicolored lines like that, for then I might be able to make something resembling art. The closest I've ever come is the Blingee, and to be honest the Blingee is not a very satisfying art form unless you sign up and pay for all those extras, like exploding flamingos and such.

But in a vain attempt to recapture the psychedelic, even hallucinogenic atmosphere of the aforementioned Hollywood Squares Beta clips, here are a couple of Blingees, I mean the kind you get if you don't sign up or pay, which look pretty low-res to me. The graceful fireworks I saw when I made this thing have sort of gone all to pot and turned into three-frames-per-second jerks. Oh well, chalk it up to low technology, which can, after all, have a beauty all its own.

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Horrific medical practices: even worse than now!

I guarantee you will find this photo gallery both horrific and fascinating. Most shocking are the attitudes behind each practice: a woman with an artifical leg hides her face in shame. Mental patients are wrapped mummylike in wet sheets and laid out in corpselike rows. "Female remedies" (for what??) imply that femaleness itself is a disease.

Come along if you dare.


http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/83858344/

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Short fiction: Big Booky

Dear God, but it had been a long time. A desert of eon time when climbing back on the horse of creative longing seemed so remote as to be impossible. When the new novel finally came to her, she felt like Sarah in the Bible, finding out she was pregnant at the age of - what was, it, 113? Some unlikely number like that.

She fell into her third novel, plunged down into it like a waterslide, as if the years between books were melting, no longer glaring her in the face. The writing of it was a revelation, a year and a half of panting fainting work, pursuing and pursuing. And then came the three-year hunger.

Three years of nearly giving up hope. 

Because nobody wanted it.

Nobody had the slightest interest in it.

Her friends felt that it was all right.

Or maybe they were trying to make her feel better.

"Just be glad you can write again."

"I am."

"Just  be satisfied with the process."

"I am."

"It's still a book, even though nobody reads it."

"No it's not."

The three years entailed so many inquiries that fell on barren soil that she came close to giving up, and for eleven months wouldn't blog or go on Facebook or do any of the shenanigans writers had to do now to look hip and relevant and survive. Her mind went back to the first novel, the fizzy joy, the sense that a lifetime of longing had been completed (with no way of knowing that the longing would soon come back and stay forever). 

She remembered the lovely lady at the big bookstore, the one local writers called (somewhat scornfully) Big Booky. Her name was Jeannine and she was a big bustling lady who looked like an old-time travel agent, before the internet spoiled it all. Someone who could have been a social director on the Love Boat. She was so thrilled to set up a launch for a local author, and it all went so well, there was such a good turnout, and then two years later it happened again! There was no stopping her now, and everyone knew it. Everything was aces up, she could do no wrong.

And then.

The famine, a plague of Biblical proportions. A trudge, or a slow slither through thick dust. Years and years of just surviving, of wondering where the wonder went.

In the meantime, while the rest of life just insisted on continuing, things began to happen at Big Booky. Foremost was the fact that the books had almost disappeared. They had slowly slipped and crept and cringed to the back of the store, and there they stayed like a dirty secret. This was ironic, because it was Big Booky that had driven all the neighborhood book stores out of business, like the snakes out of Ireland. Now Big Booky was a gift store, high-end gifts, the kind she couldn't afford, though she did once buy a tiny box of chocolates for a friend that cost $12.99.

When the famine broke and she wrote the book and she sent the queries and she walked the miles, and when hope was nearly extinguished, there came that word that every writer thirsts for: 

YES. 

A yes, by God, a Yes, and her third book, her novel that she had yearned into being, was actually going to become real.

But it had been ten years since her first novel, and suddenly she realized that she and her work were perceived as Paleozoic. Never mind the  rapturous reviews, the "fiction at its finest", the triumphant readings and signings in venues she had only dreamed about before. There was a sense that having a third book out, after everything had changed so much, was like having a baby when you were fifty: it was inappropriate to feel any pride in it at all.

She picked up with her prickly little antennae that she was so unhip as to be an embarrassment, someone you'd want to hide in the back of the store along with all the books. For if book stores now buried their own merchandise as if it was just too uncool to show, what chance did an author have, an old author who didn't know how to move and shake and get down on her knees in front of the necessary men?

The launch! Where was she going to arrange the launch? It was an exercise in humiliation to even consider having it at Big Booky, where the other two events had gone so well. Nevertheless, inured to the endless humiliations authors had to endure as the price of daring to write, and in full knowledge of the fact that it was now the only book store that existed, she went in to talk to them. 

The events planner didn't come out from wherever she was hiding because she was "busy", so they palmed her off onto someone who wanted to do it even less than she did. The young man she spoke to wouldn't make eye contact. His voice was monotone. He did not say hello. When she mentioned she had had her first two launches with them, he took the copies of the novels from her without looking at them and disappeared.

When he returned, he said, "These didn't show up in the computer." Did he even believe the store had sold them and (she thought) proudly launched a local author? (Twice?) Then he fired a series of questions at her, not about the book (in which he displayed no interest at all), but what her social media contacts were, and whether she had contacted head office about whether or not they were going to carry the book. 

She wasn't stupid, she knew this was crucial, but why was it so front-loaded, why such indifference to her passion? But passion was a liability now. And since when did authors have to arrange for mega-corporations to carry their small-box novels? Wasn't this just another opportunity for humiliation and shame?

It was her least proficient area, and she knew her publisher should have been taking care of it, but she was expected to rhyme off all the jargon, though at one point she wondered if he were selling widgets or McDonald's hamburgers rather than pieces of literature. He did not engage with her, didn't smile and attempted no human connection whatsoever, but it was obvious that SHE had failed, that it had been a grave mistake to tell him about the other two novels, that they were a black mark on her record. 

He told her they were booked up for the next three months and did not give her any followup information. Before she left, he pressed a card into her hand with his name and title: Customer Experience Manager. Just to shock him, she shook his hand, and his dulled face briefly registered a look of astonishment.

It was happening again. She was trying, too hard, running back and forth as she had always done.  He was sleepwalking in a high-end gift shop that no longer even pretended to take an interest in "local writers": they were a joke now, they didn't move enough copies, and who would ever come out to see them? Big Booky had gone the way of Big Pharma and Big Burger and Big Everything Else. She had never felt so irrelevant. After all that toiling and despair, and the tenuous and almost bizarre rebirth, she realized her book was an orphan in the storm, that no one welcomed it, that no one gave a crap about whether anyone ever read it at all. 

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