The Glass Character

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Monday, June 19, 2017

"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.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

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.