Pile o' paws

In a dark room, I can sometimes see these four white paws walking along with no cat attached to them. Or so it seems. When he lies down, Bentley's paws form a neat pile, white with pink toes. Sometimes they look more like gloves. Actually, his paws are FIVE colours: pink, white, grey, brown and black. Talented cat - eh?

And we wub hims so.

TEENAGE DOLL (1957 Trailer): Hellcats in tight pants

                          Hellcats in tight pants.

They're back: and still kicking ass!

Beavers have been an ongoing concern - read, "plague" - on Lafarge Lake for many years now. This is a small lake in the centre of Coquitlam, a seething urban community which for some reason attracts all manner of wildlife. But beavers aren't particularly welcome here when all they do is chaw down every tree in the vicinity and chew up branches all over the place to make their twiggy, branchy lodges.

I wasn't even sure what a beaver lodge looked like, until I saw this. I knew beavers had moved in, been relocated, and come back, many times already. There are even articles about it in the local papers. And it was obvious something was going on when I saw that wire mesh around the bottoms of most of the trees. 

Then this! Proof positive that the Lafarge Lake beavers have made a triumphant return. It was actually pretty cool, and now I'm having fantasies of seeing a real beaver, which I never have in the wild before. (And I call myself a Canadian!) And a baby beaver - I think I'd die with joy. They're pretty secretive, and they must do most of their work during off hours, because dams and lodges seem to spring up overnight. But there is babymaking going on in there, make no mistake.

Deep inside the burrows of the nightmare (to the Park Board, which is getting sick of setting out humane traps and relocating beavers a few hundred miles away, only to have them come back in a month), we can see the inner workings of the lodge. It's cleverly constructed so that you can only access it from underwater. Unless you're the Park Board, carrying dynamite.

But they'd better not! WHO could blow up a baby beaver (also known as a kit)? You'd have to have a heart of cold, hard steel.

For more information, see the aged but still relevant blog post below (which got over 6000 views when I first put it up! Still trying to figure that one out.)

Beavers kick polar bear ass!

Bentley sleeps with his eyes open

The Slime People - Vintage Horror Movie Trailer

I'm posting this without knowing anything about it! I haven't even SEEN it. But with a title like that. . . 

Back in the USSR

This is a longer version of something I found on Facebook. It had two-inch-high white captions which covered  1/3 of the screen and ruined it completely. This kind of caption is no doubt so huge that they will be easily visible on phones, though I do wonder about the power and majesty of a video that is one inch square.

This version is longer, which is good, but it has - well, it has Irish music with it, which is completely incongruous, but at least it's NICE music, and I don't see any jarring captions.

So. . .


Katskhi pillar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

კაცხის სვეტი 

Katskhi Pillar

The Katskhi pillar (Georgian: კაცხის სვეტი, kac'xis svet'i) is a natural limestone monolith located at the village of Katskhi in western Georgian region of Imereti, near the town of Chiatura. It is approximately 40 metres (130 ft) high, and overlooks the small river valley of Katskhura, a right affluent of the Q'virila.

The rock, with visible church ruins on a top surface measuring c. 150 m2, has been venerated by locals as the Pillar of Life and a symbol of the True Cross, and has become surrounded by legends. It remained unclimbed by researchers and unsurveyed until 1944 and was more systematically studied from 1999 to 2009. These studies determined the ruins were of an early medieval hermitage dating from the 9th or 10th century. A Georgian inscription paleographically dated to the 13th century suggests that the hermitage was still extant at that time. Religious activity associated with the pillar was revived in the 1990s and the monastery building had been restored within the framework of a state-funded program by 2009.

Architecture

The Katskhi pillar complex currently consists of a church dedicated to Maximus the Confessor, a crypt (burial vault), three hermit cells, a wine cellar, and a curtain wall on the uneven top surface of the column. At the base of the pillar are the newly built church of Simeon Stylites and ruins of an old wall and belfry.

This is Katskhi Lite, of course, because who cares about the rest of it? Y'all can look it up, if you do, which is the (only?) nice thing about the internet. And as we all know, there's no more USSR, so Georgia is no longer part of it.

Versions of this clip (30 seconds or so) claim that a solitary monk lives on the top of this structure and only comes down twice a year, on a long ladder. This is total Facebook bullshit, though archeologists did find a way to get up there, likely by helicopter. But that doesn't sound as cool as the monk.

Maybe it's an Irish monk?

Back in the U.S.S.R.

The Beatles

Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC
Didn't get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man, I had a dreadful flight
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the USSR, yeah

Been away so long I early knew the place
Gee, it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR

Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia's always on my my my my my my my my my mind
Oh, come on

Hu hey hu, hey, ah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boys
Back in the USSR

Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia's always on my my my my my my my my my mind

Oh, show me round your snow peaked
Mountain way down south
Take me to your daddy's farm
Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out
Come and keep your comrade warm
I'm back in the USSR
Hey, you don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the USSR
Oh, let me tell you honey

BHANGRA!

Rhapsody in black

 
 

Star-crossed: the life and times of Anthony Perkins

I keep coming back to Tony Perkins, and have never been sure why. The reasons are complicated: he was mysterious, misunderstood, and summed up in my  mind what it means to be human: conflicted, passionate, vitriolic, kind, altruistic, selfish, brilliant, obtuse, and on and on the list goes.

And he was cute, too, when he was young and first became a big star. Cute in a way women loved, right up to and including the gorgeous, girlish Berry Berenson (sister of supermodel Marisa), who married him in spite of the open secret of his homosexuality. They had two sons and stayed together for 20 years, until he died of AIDS. Tragically, Berry was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre on 9-11.

There was something star-crossed about both of them, I think.

I've read lots of stuff about him, including Charles Winecoff's Split Image, which in some ways is the best bio of anyone I've ever read, but which in other ways offends the hell out of me. Never has a biographer been so thorough in ferreting out the real Perkins, penetrating the million smokescreens he put up, but then he wrecks it: he quotes "an unnamed source" who claims to have been Perkins' lover, outlining in excruciating, completely unnecessary detail what he liked to do in bed. Would a heterosexual actor have been subjected to such humiliation, and from a completely unreliable kiss-and-tell source who probably sought some sort of payoff?

I found another book about him, Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life by Ronald Bergan, and I pounced on it. I thought it might be bland compared to Winecoff's claw-sharpening meow-fest, but on the first page it grabbed me because of a surprisingly bang-on description of his unusual body type.


The author was speaking to the actor backstage after a performance. "He was stripped to the waist, revealing the smooth-skinned svelte figure of a man half his age - he was forty-seven at the time - and what the actor William Chappell described as 'an Egyptian torso, unnaturally broad in the shoulder and small in the waist and so flat it is almost one-dimensional.' Oh yes.

In spite of his great natural talent and versatility as an actor, there was a strangeness about Tony, a remoteness: he was the perennial outsider, but didn't seem to mind it, which made him even more odd. He wasn't a warm actor, but had certain abilities that were unique and eerie. In the Ken Russell turkey Crimes of Passion, he plays a demented minister addicted to sex toys and porn. Kathleen Turner plays a part-time hooker, and at the height of his Byzantine fits of craziness they have this conversation:

"If you're a minister, I'm Snow White. Who are you? You're not a reverend. Who are you?"

"I'm you."

Yes. Tony was us. He needled, he probed, he burrowed inside, he smiled boyishly as he found the subtle flaw and put his hand into it. The cracked cup, the broken building, the chipped tooth, all these were the province of Perkins and his calmly detached fascination. He snooped around the edges of the human condition, not unaffected of course, and capable of a paradoxical deep devotion to friends and family, but still the perennial observer. Why did people like him so much, care so much about a man who seemed almost cold? And they did, they loved him. As he lay dying of AIDS, literally gasping out his last, friends camped around his bedside in sleeping bags. Hundreds of people came to his memorial service, which lasted hours.


Tony loved dogs, but he was definitely more cat than dog, sniffing delicately, warily drawing back. And sometimes lunging forward in almost predatory sensuality. Bergan claims he had charm, but in the original, supernatural sense, a spellbinding power.

A friend once tried to describe his unusual body type with its coathanger shoulders and long, gangly arms, which made his head seem proportionally small: he resembled "some sort of great prehistoric bird". Exotic, a little scary, impossible to comprehend, echoing all those stuffed owls and ravens of Psycho. Oh yes, Psycho, we were getting to that. Or were we?

(BLOGGER'S NOTE. Having just posted about the Anthony Perkins action figure - and I've been looking for a good photo of that '80s artifact for a long time - I thought of this piece that I wrote SIX YEARS ago, and felt I was within my rights to dust it off. Unlike most of my longer pieces, it actually got some views. I used a huge font which I felt I had to reduce. The photos have been changed almost completely.)

Scary!

Church of the Holy Sea Monkey

Not-so-little pitchers

I only had five frames from different perspectives (two photographers, in fact, taking several different pitches), but this gives you the idea. Ryan has been working up to this for some time. I wasn't there, but his Mom tells me he did great!

Totally EPIC!

"I dream of love": a cat animation

Waffle falling over

A*P*E (1976) Trailer

Angryface

"TROG!!"

(These will look teeny if you're watching this on your phone. Best to click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom. )

Mutant sheep: the ultimate bad monster movie trailer

Every day when I get up in the morning, I think, ahhhh. Today I will find yet another cheesy monster movie trailer from the 1970s. There seem to be several million of them on the internet now. The thing is, I've heard that a lot of these were never released theatrically, and home video didn't really exist back then, so. . . ? I won't probe too deeply into that mystery.

Some of these are funny, some downright disgusting. This one is simply weird. I like weird, so long as it does not stray so far into the bizarre that one's normal orientation in reality is completely destroyed.

I think horror movies play with this, the sense that things are turning upside-down and there isn't a goddamn thing we can do to stop it or even slow it down. If you look at a human lifetime and try to add up how many ACTUAL moments of horror we experience, I think you'd find that oh fuck. Just watch the trailer.

Satan Wants Your Mind and Soul

I thought long and hard before posting this bizarre, even horrifying story about one of the strangest figures to inhabit the internet, the crazed evangelical preacher Jonathan Bell. I discovered JB maybe 3 or 4 years ago, stumbled on him while researching corrupt televangelists. You know the kind. But this. The more I found out about him, the more unbelievable it got.

I don't know if you want to read all of this or not, but it gave me a chance to trot out some of my favorite Pentecostal gifs, featuring some of the strangest human behaviour on record. These are Holy Ghosters of the most extreme degree, experiencing something called the Toronto Blessing (involving a lot of flailing around and guffawing). There are many more Bell videos on YouTube, though he really only did two official broadcasts: the "casual" one (excerpted above) and another, longer one he did dressed in (inexplicably) a tuxedo.

I suddenly realized that this guy, a former hairdresser, has hair so much like Donald Trump's that it's downright eerie.

(Excerpted from Snake Oil, 2009)

Upstart TV preachers flock to Dallas like young starlets drawn to Hollywood. So began the story of Jonathan Bell who arrived in Dallas from Kingston, Ontario in early 1992 with a vision from God to start a television ministry.

Accompanying Jonathan were Carrie Hart, a 71-year-old invalid, and her 35-year-old retarded son. With the $1400 per month that the Harts received in government checks, the three got set up in a one bedroom apartment in the predominately gay Oak Lawn section of Dallas, and Jonathan Bell Ministries was on its way.

That first Texas summer, however, took its toll on the trio of transplanted Canadians. Their living arrangement had deteriorated to the point that on the night of July 28th, police were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance at the ministry apartment, whereupon Jonathan was hauled in on aggravated assault of an invalid.

The police incident report reveals a sorry state of affairs: Jonathan typically sent the Harts out early each morning on ministry errands, and they were expected back promptly at 9 PM. Being late, or not following instructions exactly resulted in a beating. Neighbors told police that they had seen the Harts with bruises and black eyes. The Harts were given just a few dollars a month, and Jonathan got the only bed while they slept on the floor with no bedding.

In what may have been a water baptism gone horribly awry, Harry Hart, the son, claimed that earlier in the summer Jonathan had tried to drown him at an area lake by holding him underwater by his hair.

Within a few days of Jonathan's arrest, the Harts returned to Canada, and all charges were dropped.

This sordid little tale would not be worth telling if shortly thereafter Jonathan had not gone on to produce two of the most psychotic, disturbing religious programs ever made.

Flanked by a potted plant, Screaming Boy was born in the studios of Dallas Cable Access. Religious fury in a rented tux. The petulant, porcine pentecostal launched into a hellfire and brimstone sermon at max volume which didn't subside for a solid hour.

But much more than the message itself was the delivery, complete with nervous tics, bulging veins, and a childish, bullying demeanor. An implicit "n'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah" was almost audible at the end of every sentence. His main message concerned those smug, self-satisfied, so-called Christians in "their fancy churches" who "weren't gonna make it in."

"I've been looking for a church here in Dallas where they don't just preach the Word on Sunday and live like the DEVIL the rest of the week! Last Friday I went to a singles get together at the Church of Christ, and they were going to show Terminator 2...to people who weren't even saved! I mean, COME ON!" [note that the singles group was going to show Terminator 2. I guess Jonathan took care of THAT!] "If you don't realize you're a filthy, rotten sinner, you're going to hell, Buck-o."

So don't you blame Screaming Boy when, on Judgement Day, you're on the wrong side of the gate. And, hey, you might be in a car crash tonight. You'll see. Jonathan's making it in, and you're not. N'yah-n'yah n'yah n'yah-n'yah.

"I"M NOT AN EXTREMIST!!!"

Speweth Jonathan: "I study the Bible five to eight hours a day!! And because I have faith as a child, Jesus Christ shows me visions all the time. He talks with me all the time, whether YOU believe it or not!" [So THERE!]

"Two years ago God gave me a vision where I saw young people, men and women - no children there - no clothes on...They had their hands up in the air and they were screaming and yelling in Hell!"

Also perversely compelling were the little tidbits he threw in about his own life. Abandoned by his mother at age eleven, Jonathan was put in a foster home with a man who sexually abused him. He suffered from depression until age twenty-seven, but managed to build a successful career as a hairdresser making, he claimed, $100,000 a year. He led a singles group at a church in Kingston, Ontario, but then God told him to go to Dallas and start his own ministry, and to build a Christian Boy's Ranch for abused youngsters.

Hmmmmmm... Good thing that in that vision of Hell that God gave Jonathan, none of the naked people were under eighteen.

My writing skills at conveying the viewing experience of watching Screaming Boy are woefully inadequate. If I said he was a cross between Porky Pig and Sam Kinison, would that help? If I noted that for no reason little subtitles would appear on the screen with slogans like "Satan Wants Your Mind and Soul," would you start to understand how mind-numbingly weird these shows were? Or that, in the finest cable access tradition, Jonathan spent half the time looking into the wrong camera?

Sadly, after producing just two one hour programs on Dallas Cable Access, Jonathan Bell vanished. Calls to Dallas Cable Access yeilded no information. Letters sent to his Dallas PO Box went unanswered.

While reviewing the two Screaming Boy episodes in preparation of this story, I decided to call the church in Kingston where Jonathan said he had led the singles group.

"We are in no way associated with Jonathan Bell. If you're writing something about him, please don't mention the name of this church. We don't know any more than what's been in the papers."

click

The papers?? Surely they weren't concerned about a little blurb in the Dallas paper almost three years ago about the assault on the Harts..

With much excitement and a healthy dose of foreboding, I dialed the number for the Kingston Whig-Standard. The worst was confirmed.

"A Kingston hairstylist and former host of a self-help cable TV show, who is facing a number of sexual charges involving children, will remain in jail until a bail hearing Monday.

"Jonathan Bell, the 35-year-old owner of the Jonathan Bell Salon at 477 Macdonnell St., appeared briefly at a bail hearing yesterday in provincial court on Wellington Street.
"He faces 11 sexual molestation charges, some of them stretching back almost two decades...

"Besides running his own salon, Bell was known to many people in the Kingston area through his short-lived Cablenet TV program, called Success In Life.

"Rob Heeney, program manager at Kingston Cablenet, said the show ran monthly from September 1993 to December 1993. 'It was a self-help show,' said Heeney. Part of the show involved Bell giving people make-overs."

--excerpted from The Kingston Whig-Standard, November 4, 1994.

Subsequent articles revealed that Jonathan pleaded not guilty, was denied bail, and that still more charges were filed.

It is interesting and somewhat telling that upon his return to Canada he choose to name his new television program so similarly to Robert Tilton's "Success N Life," even though he expressed nothing but sneering contempt for "so-called preachers here in Dallas who live in their big, fancy houses."

It occurs to me now that what was played out on Dallas Cable Access was more than a tormented individual ranting and raving about Jesus. What we had witnessed was no less than Jonathan Bell in an all out battle with his personal demons, the title match for his very soul.

Chalk this one up for the Devil.

Man O' War: the look of eagles

One of the all-time champion thoroughbred racehorses, Man O' War, sire of generations of winners. And oh, that flaming sorrel coat!

Girl love

Can Bentley talk?

Should I post this? Maybe not

I have my reasons for thinking these things, but in saying them, I break many taboos. That's why I need to say them. I came to the conclusion that there is no one on earth I can share this with, and that appalls me and doesn't surprise me.

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

So why post all these cheap previews? Cuz I like them, s'why. And because no matter what I post, it makes no difference, I get views or I don't. I was getting 700 per post there for a while, and had no idea why. I'm back to getting, like, two, and I don't know why that is either. So I might as well just do what I like. If I write something and really put a lot of time, energy and effort into it, invariably, it gets hardly any views. So why am I doing this? For self-entertainment, I think. Just to have something to tend. Like a garden. Since I can't grow pot.

Oh by the way. . . interesting, unknown fact about me! I DID grow pot once. My parents were so oblivious of my goings-on that I grew an enormous pot plant in the window of my bedroom, and they never once said ONE THING about it. It never got to the size where I could get buds off it, but I dried and smoked the leaves one night (my parents were asleep upstairs), and the weatherman on TV suddenly seemed to be scat-singing. You know, those spontaneous riffs that jazz singers do. 

The Mighty Gorga Trailer

Trippy: the view from the bottom of a bucket

Anthony Perkins action figure