So begins another spring

THE LULLABY OF SPRING

Donovan

Rain has showered far her drip

Splash and trickle running

Plant has flowered in the sand

Shell and pebble sunning

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

In the misty tangled sky

Fast a wind is blowing

In the new-born rabbit's heart

River life is flowing

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

From the dark and wetted soil

Petals are unfolding

From the stony village kirk

Easter bells of old ring

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

Rain has showered far her drip

Splash and trickle running

Plant has flowered in the sand

Shell and pebble sunning

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

You spoke. We listened?

You spoke, and Trader Joe's listened.

In January, Trader Joe's was one of 400 businesses to say "no" to customers openly carrying guns in their Texas stores.

Now, "in light of recent customer feedback and questions,"Trader Joe's has reaffirmed their policy and announced that guns are not welcome in their stores nation-wide.

When companies stand up for gun sense, we have to let them know we've got their backs so that other companies will follow their example.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. While I can appreciate the sentiment of this, it also made my jaw drop.

I have never seen a gun. Ever. The only person I've ever known with guns collected antique rifles that he never fired. I never saw those either.

It just doesn't occur to us. I mean.  You also have to wonder, is it still okay to covertly, secretly carry guns, so long as nobody at Trader Joe's sees them?

It's a language we just don't speak. I'm not trying to say anything but that.

Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles [800% Slower]

For every drop of rain that falls

Drano cleans and opens drains - and other things

This is so similar to those jaw-dropping "douche with Lysol" ads that at first I thought. . . oh, surely not! But it's a "not". Still, it isn't much of a stretch, is it? The husband has that same look of cold contempt, as if he is (justifiably!) about to leave her forever, while she broods over what her sin might have been THIS time. If the Drano doesn't work on her drain, she could always use it for something else. After all, the Lysol killed "germs" and everything else in its path, so might a drain cleaner work even better? But her husband might be in for a nasty surprise during those intimate moments.

Actual 1961 Nuclear Attack Message

Listen at your own risk.

Dial-up sound 700% slower (Creepy)

Visions of a Cold War Kid

When I was a kid, back in the 1960s, everything was The Future. I was constantly hearing about what life would be like "In The Year 2000".

It was a never-ending refrain: "By the year 2000, we'll" (all be walking around on the moon, have domed cities with climate control, zoom around in flying cars like on The Jetsons, have our living room rugs vacuumed by a robot).

And computers. Yes, computers were a definite menace. Every episode of The Twilight Zone had a computer in it, and man, they were EVIL. They always turned out to be the villain, the dark force behind every bad thing that had happened in that smudgy, surreal, black-and-white half-hour. 

It was almost as bad as Star Trek, where by the end of the show the evil computer would start to smoke and jibber as Captain Kirk managed to convince it to self-destruct in order to save the universe. Though why computers would have smoke coming out of them is anyone's guess. Call Bill Gates, something must've shorted out.

In this futuristic scenario, convenience and sterility meant everything. There was no food. Of course not! Food came in the form of pills. Green pill, vegetable. Red pill, meat. Etc. I used to brood in my morose child-way (for even then, as now, I was deeply depressive and fearful, though I told no one) about the demise of food. How food was, as my Dad used to say, "going out of style". No, actually, what he said was my brother Arthur was "eating like it was going out of style" when he attacked a giant stack of Aunt Jemimas. And I took it literally, that eating really WAS going out of style: something I could readily believe, with all that talk of pills. Soon one of my favorite activities, something I always thought I could depend on, would become obsolete.

I was a Cold War kid, though I had no idea there was ANY kind of war on, cold or otherwise. Walter Cronkite, who knew everything, often talked about something called The Iron Curtain, and I knew it was all the way over on the other side of the world, but I didn't know what it was.  I knew something about the Great Wall of China, and maybe even a little bit about the Berlin Wall, so all these things got conflated into a massive, completely solid, miles-thick curtain, a ramparts cutting across Russia and keeping all the Americans out, or the Russians in.

Communists were bad, but not as bad to us as they were to the Americans. We had a funny attitude towards the Americans then, though no funnier than it is now. We felt sorry for them, and we feared them slightly, though because Canadians always "stand on guard" (it's in our national anthem about 18 times), we held on to our values pretty securely. Americans were crazy: they were The Beverley Hillbillies, they were Dragnet, they were The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Though I knew a lot of people who cried when Kennedy got shot, at one point my mother told me quietly "he wasn't our President, you know," and it gave me a sense of perspective.

No one talked about this, but around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I knew absolutely nothing about: only that I woke up screaming every night for weeks), the TV stations from Detroit would frequently do A Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. "This is only a test." A logo would flash on the screen: Civil Defense, a name I found inexplicably terrifying. Then came this bone-penetrating sound: BOOOOOOOOP. When I posted a slowed-down version of an old computer dial-up modem, every hair on my body stood up because it reminded me of This Is Only A Test. I would freeze in place, go numb. I don't remember another person ever being in the room with me when this happened, and I told no one about it. I was sure that the world was about to end.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when - I swear this is true - I heard a very loud air raid siren outside. Yes! Just like in the movies when the bombers are swooping down on London during the Blitz. Droaaaannnnnnnn - that doomy sound. (You know what I'm talking about.) I phoned up my friend and babbled. I heard it, I heard it, I heard the siren. What siren? It sounded like an air raid siren from an old World War II movie. Oh - maybe they were just testing it out.

Oh.

I wonder now: as with the Emergency Broadcasting System, the sirens are there to be used, not just "things" or abstract concepts. It made me wonder - still does - if every city has air raid sirens or some mysterious way of alerting its citizens of certain doom. For some reason, what comes to mind is what my scientist husband told me about NASA. Before every prolonged space flight, each astronaut is given a cyanide capsule in case they get stuck out there and can't get back.

Growing up doomy leaves marks on you, it does. My joy is always darkened. Recently I had to take down a post that literally sent my very modest readership scattering for cover. Four longtime readers bailed in just a few hours. No kidding, they left. The only reason I could think of was what I had just posted. It truly was a sort of vision of how Armageddon might unfold. And it might. Although I realize we all have to live as if it won't.

Climate change, terrorism, the nuclear weapons we all seem to have forgotten all about - and human evil - the collapse of the power grid - and the other thing no one mentions any more (though it was discussed incessantly in the 1960s), OVERPOPULATION - these things could converge on a fragile, already-overburdened world. And I don't want it to happen, folks. Don't ever think that. But back in the '60s we bickered and fumed and wrung our hands about the planet being choked with humanity at two billion people, and - strangely, very strangely to me - we virtually never think, talk or write about it now that it has exceeded seven. 

It's lonely putting your work out there, where there is this unpredictable response, or even non-response, along with wildly uneven exposure. Once in  a while I go back into old posts, unable to find something, and I see that a post has gotten something like 10,000 views (one on footbinding in China, for example, or Carrie Fisher and her electroconvulsive therapy). The next post will get, like, 15 views. I've tried to figure it out. Someone told me to use more intriguing search terms, but what if it's a video with a cat and a rabbit? 

But I find I can't write "popular" or go by a formula. I write because I have to, because I don't feel whole without it. It is what I have always done to survive and to try to make sense of the world. This matters more to me than format - or it must, because everyone else's blog is now solid white with huge lettering, and mine isn't. Though I changed the name of it at one point because someone told me Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams was "embarrassing" (hey! Not to me! It was satire. It's awful when someone doesn't "get" satire and says YOU'RE the dummy), I haven't substantially updated the site since I started it, it's still in the old brown-paper-bag format that I find easy to use and "not plastic" (as we used to say in the '60s). 

Recurrent themes run through personal blogs like this whether you want them to or not. Certain obsessions pop up again and again. Blogs are supposed to have a theme, and this one doesn't, but is nevertheless (in view of my obsessiveness) always in danger of becoming repetitive. One definitely-recurring theme is paranoia and the end of the world, as previewed by the Emergency Broadcasting System tests that broke into my Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. BOOOOOOOOP. And sirens going off that aren't supposed to. Or maybe they're just testing them out.

Food being replaced by pills never took off as a concept. Not even close. No one could have predicted the current truly astonishing levels of obesity back when 250 pounds was considered grotesque and horribly unhealthy. Computers are ubiquitous and run everything, but if they're as evil as we thought they would be, no one notices any more. They HAVE taken over our lives, just as Rod Serling/Gene Roddenberry tried to warn us, but now we aren't afraid of them any more. We like it just fine.

If George Orwell were alive today - but he wouldn't be. I think he would have committed suicide at the developments in surveillance that are now completely standard. Like frogs in hot water, we not only don't notice we're being boiled, we kind of like the sensation of the heat.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

My Meowy Valentine: Victorian greeting card art

My funny Valentine

Sweet, comic Valentine

You make me smile with my heart

Your looks are laughable

Unphotographable

Yet you're my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

Don't change a hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little Valentine, stay

And each day will be Valentine's Day

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

Don't, please don't change a hair for me

Not if, not if you care for me

Stay little valentine, stay

And each day will be Valentine's

Every day will be, every day will be Valentine's Day

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

"But it looked OK on paper!"

I promise, some day I WILL do a post on the Winchester Mystery House, which is full of such nonsensical/incomprehensible features as windows built into the floor and staircases that lead nowhere. Meanwhile, these are design fails, like this playground equipment for when you're babysitting a particularly poisonous little brat.

Just waiting for that major derailment!

"Oh, what a beautiful mor - " CLUNK.

I am trying to figure this out. Do you go UP this wheelchair ramp? Or do you go bumping down the stair part first, then - . And how would this work for strollers?

No doubt here - you have to love pain.

Great garage for a flying car, maybe like the one on The Jetsons. Is that their driveway, blocked by a fence, running at right angles to the house? As I look it it, though, it's plain the architect just put the garage on the wrong floor.

This staircase would've made Sarah Winchester proud. Or at least it would have made sense to her. Perhaps the designer went to a seance.

Now this is just wrong.

Little People, Big ATM?  Can't be a drive-through, unless you're lying on your belly on a giant skateboard.

I like this! I do! Trees deserve their own space on (or in) the property.

This one, though, I truly do not get.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Squid sex

These are so very beautiful! I stumbled upon them while trying to find information about the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Shows you how you can get side-tracked. Please note, I am merely borrowing these for a brief display and NOT taking credit for their creation. I can't find who made them because they are part of a research project on squid reproduction from Leland Stanford Junior University. Some kid had fun making these late at night! A couple of them aren't working very well, unfortunately. I have no idea how many kilobops these require to bop themselves into being. But sometimes they work, and the ones that do - they are pure art in motion.