Fraish from the cow!

"Fraishness itself! That's Cahnation fraish milk at its best  in nourishment. Straight from the dairy, Cahnation fraish milk is fraish today and every day. Rushed to your door and to your store. Have a glass of fraishness itself. Drink Cahnation fraish milk with Vitamin D added, the milk children love the flavor of, in the red and white carton."

I wish I could get a fix on this accent, for it's one I've heard more times than I can count. It's always American, of course - a Canadian never heard of "fraish" anything, not even a Tim Horton's doughnut (and here I use the classical spelling and punctuation). The "Cahnation" part seems to say Boston or at least New England, but I always thought the weird bending of the short e into something more like "aiee" came from the Midwest. This might just be the most extreme example I've heard, but I remember Clark Gable talking like this in Gone with the Wind (see clip below, around 0:40 - he says "fayyshun" for "fashion") and even my beloved Harold Lloyd, whose Nebraskan roots sometimes showed themselves later in life (as accents are wont to do). If I could pin down where these actors came from - . And I recently heard a woman do it, too, if I could just remember who she was. It was really extreme! 

You no doubt noticed that "fraish" or "fraishness" appears six times in thirty seconds in that Carnation Milk ad. Then as now, that's about average for advertisement. 

One duck on a beautiful lake

One of my more poetical videos. This was an experiment in adding music which worked out fairly well.

Bentley in a box

                                Cat in a box.
 

Bird distress call

I heard this bird sound in the back yard - it just seemed to go on and on. I couldn't see anything or describe the sound to Google, which sometimes helps me identify species (I nailed down Swainson's thrush the other day, after about a century of wondering what it was). Sounded like pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. . . It was hard to say if the bird was in distress, proclaiming its territory or trying to attract a mate. This video includes perhaps the worst camera work I've ever done, but the audio is very interesting. The sounds accelerate as time goes on until it's a kind of machine-gun bird sound.

Cat video with FOUR MILLION views!

Actually, it's more like 4,087,144. This video features ten seconds of a shaved cat scratching at the door of a vet clinic to get out. I've spent six or eight hours on posts before and gotten virtually NO views. It's the old left-out-of-the-playground thing, I guess - once a loser, always a loser, and there is no beating those dynamics, ever. They are with you for life, like a family curse. I have no reason to want views however - they would add nothing to my life! I know why I am doing this - because I want to.

A lot of people in the comments section claimed it's cruel to shave a cat. Maybe they're thinking of a cat running around all the time with no fur on it. This is actually called a lion cut, and both dogs and cats get it when their fur is matty, dirty, too thick or unruly.

I'll tell you about shaving our cat.

This was in the Murphy days, long ago. He was an enormous cat - 22 pounds at his maximum - with a woolly double coat, and as he aged it got matty and harder to groom or deal with. If I tried to help him with it, I was sliced and diced. Once I got bitten and needed a tetanus shot.

We started taking him to a groomer once a year where they would give him a bath and comb-out, but every year it got harder. Then one year they phoned me during a grooming and said,"Permission to shave him." They didn't call it a lion cut. They didn't call it anything, just shaving him. There was no other way to clean up his dense, woolly fur.

So they shaved him, and he came home looking like a poodle - but the first thing he did was flop down on the rug, purring, and roll back and forth. Then he groomed his back and tummy with an ecstatic look on his face. He got through that hot summer with an immaculate short coat, and by fall it was pristine and new. From then on, he grew himself a new fur coat once a year.

Mothra kicks ass!

BONUS!  Deleted Godzilla vs. Mothra scene from Family Guy!

Bonus-bonus! Godzilla vs .Mothra colouring pages, not made by me.

Mothra chalk drawing

Mothra PicMix page

One more Mothra gif

Animated jello mold

"I'm afraid of love!"

 

            

Gosling disaster!

This was just so sad. A very small gosling had slipped through a grate across a stream, leading to a waterfall that made it impossible for it to get back to its parents. They were honking frantically as they tried to get to it.  A man climbed over the side of the bridge to rescue the gosling, with predictable results: it ran into the brush and disappeared. Now that I think about it, an adult might have been able to rescue it by either picking it up in its beak and flying away, or shuffling it onto its back. I've seen newly-hatched goslings ride their parents' backs before.

It doesn't seem likely this ended well, but as usual, it probably had more of a chance if we humans had stayed out of it.

Not interfering is so hard. I saw a lone duckling running around frantically a few weeks ago, peeping and peeping as if trying to find its mother and siblings. The other day I saw a tiny gosling in a group of half-grown ones, which were hissing at it and poking it savagely. I tried to get it out of there, only to have it run into the woods. My feeling was: if I can only get it into the water, it will have a better chance against predators. But the water was only a few feet away, and it seemed to prefer the shelter of a flock (even a hostile one). I've seen this a few times before, and I don't want to think too much about the inevitable conclusion. Mother Nature can be such a bitch.

Working girl: the life of Tillie the Toiler

I will admit that the name Tillie the Toiler caught my attention. As usual, I was looking for something else: vintage comic book paper dolls, the kind with so much detail that cutting out the dresses with those fiendish little tabs would be well-nigh impossible.

And in looking for paper dolls, I found. . . 

Tillie the Toiler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tillie the Toiler is a newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Russ Westover who initially worked on his concept of a flapper character in a strip he titled Rose of the Office. With a title change, it sold to King Features Syndicate which carried the strip from 1921 to 1959.
Characters and story[edit]

Stylish working girl Tillie was employed as a stenographer, secretary and part-time model. An attractive brunette, she had no problem finding men to escort her around town. Comics historian Don Markstein described the story situations:Tillie (last name Jones) toiled for a fashionable women's wear company run by clothing mogul J. Simpkins. Or usually did, anyway—she'd occasionally quit or be fired, as the plotline, which ran at breakneck pace and didn't always make perfect sense, required. 

During World War II, in fact, she even joined the U.S. Army. But she always came back to Simpkins.  Whatever she did and wherever she went, however, she was impeccably dressed in the very latest styles. This helped her in the pursuit of charming and often wealthy young men, who came and went at an alarming rate, providing grist for the story mill.

The comic strip inspired two films of the same name: Tillie the Toiler (1927), a silent film with Marion Davies in the title role, and Tillie the Toiler (1941), starring Kay Harris

Who knew? I didn't, and found her by accident. Perhaps, like the immortal Hilda, Tillie the Toiler will soon make a well-deserved comeback. She seems surprisingly contemporary. Most "girls" of the era would envy Tillie her wardrobe, if not her exciting love life. She seems to me like the quintessential flapper, financially independent (if poorly paid), with a ton of male attention. 

A typical Sunday "funny papers" page, extra-special 'cuz it's in colour. I remember those days.  This entry seems to be about the characters' grief over the passing of the jitterbug dance craze. But it's soon to be surpassed by "super-goofy dancing", which involves throwing women up in the air or over your shoulder.

This is what you'd get during the week. I notice a certain difference between Tillie (and the other girls in the office) and the rest of the characters, particularly in the men, who are somewhat primitive in appearance. A bit of Dagwood going on here. Tillie, however, is always immaculate in her dress and coiffure. The Jitterbug is still on people's minds, as in the song, "Put on your flash bang togs/You're gonna slap your dogs/At the Jitterbug Jamboree". 

Though Tillie is a "working girl" in the old-fashioned sense, being a model on the side inclined her working life towards the exotic, if not the suggestive. This was the '20s, after all, and the Hays code (which may or may not have included the funny papers) had not yet kicked in. Betty Boop still wore skirts that barely covered the essentials, whereas in wartime, they were somewhat below the knee. As for that wardrobe. . . do you remember Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City? How on earth could she afford all those Manolo Blahniks from writing one skimpy column a week about the sexual goings-on in a large American city?

Honestly, some of these are plain gorgeous! My only question now is: did Tillie, like Boop, ever become an animated character? I can't find any evidence of it, nor can I find any clips from her two eponymous (I've been waiting all my life to use that word) movies. Turner Classics may some day dredge one of them up - their selections can be pretty dreadful, stretching the definition of the word "classics". 

So is Tillie the Toiler a thinner version of Hilda? I don't think so. Hilda was carefree and unsophisticated, and while she was always on the phone, reading letters and running around in skimpy clothing, implying there were definitely boy friends in her life, you got the idea she wasn't being chased around the desk like Tillie. And her wardrobe (bikinis made of autumn leaves, daisies or flour sacks) was too simple for tabs.