I could watch these all day

Watch them, not make them.

Gershwin: by George, by Bling!

By George, by jing, by God-almighty, I found these Blingees in a George Gershwin file and decided they were too hokily cute not to post. 

I went through a Gershwin phase two or three years ago, and I can't  say it's over, since it changed me. In most of them, you see The Great Man, the Gershwin who struck a pose, whether he was (supposedly) at the piano or (supposedly) talking to his girl friend. And even: See George. See George at the beach. These are ALL posed, the products of publicity, and the early ones bespeak an androgyny that I never knew existed.

Some say Gershwin was gay, others don't care (me!), others see his flexibility in who he wanted to spend time with. Kay Swift, a brilliant composer on her own, was one of his longest and closest relationships, and he dedicated the musical Oh, Kay! to her. In fact, I've always seen that title not as whimsy but as a cry from the heart. 

Gershwin eventually ended up sad and frustrated by the public's unwillingness to embrace his full genius (the lamentably misunderstood Porgy and Bess). They seemed to want to push him back to Tin Pan Alley. They were simply more comfortable with the old George. He served their needs, while his true genius seethed inside him. 

Meantime, a horrendous, horrible thing was slowly growing in his head: a monstrous tumour which eventually claimed him, while his doctors insisted his escalating agony and shocking disability was "psychological". So psychological that when he was in the bathroom, he fell down dead, or so close to it that helping him was impossible. I see him leaving his body, hovering around the ceiling somewhere, looking down while the impotent, idiot doctors cracked his skull open like a walnut, finding a grapefruit-sized tumour that had probably been growing there for years. A sad end for a man still in his 30s, the Mozart of his time. We still have the music, but as prodigious as his output was, it was only a tiny fragment of what he kept in his idea file, his treasure box. A box that, tragically, would not be opened until it was too late.

Victorian Blingee Girls

Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered I could make compilations of my Blingee pictures. For some reason, old black and white photos bling up particularly well, with the blingee part providing a colorful animated background. Photos of Victorian women are an ideal subject for this, as no effort is made to make them look "natural". In all of them, women strike a pose and hold it. I think this was a holdover from the days when photography demanded a full minute or two of complete stillness (with those awful contraptions holding the body and head rigidly in place). 

Even when the technology improved, somehow the same rules applied. These are portraits, not photos, insects trapped in amber, or - in this case - Blingee! I'm sad to say this program no longer works, or is so crappy that I've had to replace it with an inferior one called PicMix. PicMix has literally thousands of stamps and backgrounds, but it's all in French, so finding what you want is nearly impossible. It's not true that a wider selection increases your options. It's the opposite. What you want is buried in so much useless crap that finding good stuff is nearly impossible. Thus,YouTube, and the internet in general. It has been flooded with dreck, so I'm finding searches are ever longer and more frustrating. But here are my efforts from the Golden Age of Blingee.

Guess who's coming to town?

It's a tradition at CTV News for the staff to get together for some carolling at Christmas time. I bootlegged a copy of this year's musical offering for my YouTube account (so let's hope they don't shut me down). 

And here it is - only the GOOD parts! I put together this gif compilation featuring my daughter Shannon (in purple sweater and green tinsel boa, on the right) with her group, the Christmas Chicks, reversing the frames in some places, and stringing all the super-short bits together. Did it take a long time? Could I email it to anyone, given the fact the file was so huge? Don't ask. Fun to make, though.

Cropped version. STILL too big!

Fox leaps in snow

Pied peacock

A Birthday

BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Baby back ribs at Beach Bums!

We LOVED this restaurant on Maui, one of those pulled-pork-reggae-music-seaside-breeze places with a Surf Conditions report on the wall (never mind a weather report!). Nobody talked about wind; it was swell, which is, I assume, the way wind makes waves. 

A swell place to eat, for that matter, so we came back a couple of days later, and I had the same thing: baby back ribs, cornbread to die for, pineapple coleslaw. Beach Bums brok da mout'. 

Filoscope: flip-book technology

They're all just flip-books, really, these primitive motion picture devices, and the more-widely-known mutoscope (the kind you hand-cranked after putting a penny in a slot) mounted the individual photos on a turning barrel-like device. That way, the drama could last up to half a minute rather than a few seconds.

I made some of these flip-books as a kid, but they weren't much. I didn't have the means to take a Muybridge-like series of photos, one right after the other, and I certainly couldn't draw. But I do remember the image moving (sort of) as I flipped the pages, which seemed magical. I have a feeling not all the mini-movies in the above sequence are filoscopes (I have my doubts about the chair lady), but may have been taken from the slightly-more-sophisticated mutoscope.

These were popular on "pleasure piers" during the Edwardian age, the penny arcade of the times, and some were somewhat naughty, even showing flashes of (female only, of course) nudity. This caused moralists to rant and rage about them, making them more popular than ever. 

Wikipedia proclaims:

The San Francisco Call printed a short piece about the Mutoscope in 1898, which claimed that the device was extremely popular: "Twenty machines, all different and amusing views...are crowded day and night with sightseers." However, just a few months later, the same newspaper published an editorial railing against the Mutoscope and similar machines: "...a new instrument has been placed in the hands of the vicious for the corruption of youth...These vicious exhibitions are displayed in San Francisco with an effrontery that is as audacious as it is shameless."

In 1899, The Times also printed a letter inveighing against "vicious demoralising picture shows in the penny-in-the-slot machines. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. Similar exhibitions took place at Rhyl in the men's lavatory, but, owing to public denunciation, they have been stopped."

The men's lavatory! But it's not surprising that the crude birth of the motion picture was tinged with eroticism, of witnessing the forbidden.  Even Muybridge, who called himself a scientist, was known to use comely nude females in his "motion studies". The association with peep-shows continued right into the early zeroes of the century, when quasi-erotic dances and tiny little bedroom dramas dominated. Early filmmakers had to be masters of economy of expression.

The world goes to sleep: Maui sunset

My little mongrel camera was not able to do justice to any of the sighing sights on our recent trip to Maui. As the sun sank, the sky changed color moment to moment. You don't have to wait for beautiful things here. Probably this is our last trip to a place we've visited five times. "Why?" someone asked me, puzzlement wrinkling his brow. Obviously this guy has money, and we don't. If you've got it, you can't imagine not having it. Nobody thinks about that. 

We're not exactly in the poorhouse, but we do write down all our expenses to the nearest dollar. So this was an especial treat. It's my favorite place, and it embraces you and amuses you, and the breezes are fragrant and the birds are lavish in their song. You don't have to actually DO anything in Hawaii. We drank guava juice and made toast out of that round, sweet Hawaiian bread we remembered from past trips. Even turning on the TV was a treat (and I'll be posting some samples of that, too - we love local TV and watch it wherever we go - which isn't far, let me tell you!). Probably the highlight was the gecko encounter, but now I'm starting to think he was too big for a gecko (he must have been over a foot long, including that incredible whip of a tail). Might have been an anole, though his face had an appealing Geico look. 

Uncanny: the Scarlett Johannson robot

I shouldn't trawl, or troll, or whatever-it-is-I-do, through YouTube late at night, because this is the kind of thing I find. Some inventor, a robotics expert named Ricky Ma, must have gotten awfully lonely, because he built this Scarlett Johannson robot, and she only says and does what he programs her to do. I think a lot of men might go for this, but as far as I know, Faux ScarJo isn't on the market yet. But it opens up new possibilities for the sex doll trade.

This chain of gifs does not include sound, but her voice is the least of it. We've all heard the kind of dull, monotone, generic female voice that says things like, "Please place your items in the bag." Her limbs kind of buzz and clatter, and when she opens and closes her hand it makes a whirring noise that goes straight to my solar plexus.

I made a special gif of the closeup eye-wink and slowed it down, because there is an instant when her animated face goes completely dead, back to the lifeless vinyl doll she really is. Now THAT is creepy, because it reminds us that these tricks really have very little significance unless they are used to help amputees and little kids born without an arm or leg. So let's hope the discoveries made by this bizarre mad scientist might some day have an actual use.

Grimalkin is his name

Grimalkin

My cat is such a mouser (oh dear me!)
He catches more than Towser
He sneaks along the floor, you know
And hides behind the door, and so
Grimalkin is his name!

A mouse comes up a-creeping (oh dear me!)
He thinks the cat is sleeping
He's snoring surely, but you know
His left eye isn't shut, and so
He's watching all the same!

Purr-haps you've guessed what followed (oh dear me!)
That little mouse was swallowed
I'll tell you now what happened then
Grimalkin took a nap and then
Poor Towser got the blame!

A grimalkin (also called a greymalkin) is an archaic term for a cat. The term stems from "grey" (the colour) plus "malkin", an archaic term with several meanings (a cat, a low class woman, a weakling, a mop or a name) derived from a hypocoristic form of the female name Maud. Scottish legend makes reference to the grimalkin as a faery cat that dwells in the highlands.

Nostradamus the French prophet & astrologer, 1503-1566, had a cat named Grimalkin.

A cat named Grimalkin in William Shakespeare‘s 1606 play MacBeth helped the three blind witches look into Macbeth’s future.

During the early modern period, the name grimalkin – and cats in general – became associated with the devil and witchcraft. Women tried as witches in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were often accused of having a familiar, frequently a grimalkin. A noted example is the familiar of one of the three witches in Macbeth. - Wikipedia

I first saw the name Grimalkin in a favorite childhood book of mine, King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry. This is a heavily fictionalized story about the Godolphin Arabian, one of the founding sires of the Thoroughbred breed. A fabulously prized Arab stallion named Sham is shipped to England from Arabia, a gift from some sultan-or-other - oh, let's get to the good part, shall we? Like most fairy tale characters, Sham loses his royal status and must endure many trials (not unlike Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, which Marguerite Henry no doubt read many times), including toiling as a humble cart-horse under the whip. Luckily the Earl of Godolphin intervenes in time, knowing a good piece of horseflesh when he sees one. In a wildly-unrealistic scene, Sham and Lady Roxana, an immaculate white mare primed to breed with the evil stallion Hobgoblin, break away from their handlers and elope. The Thoroughbred breed results. 

Grimalkin is a supporting character who isn't even in the book for very long, but like most cats, he makes the best of his part and gladly accompanies Agba (the little Arab horseboy) and Sham into exile, making the best of things at Wicken Fen. The brilliant illustrator Wesley Dennis had a talent, if not genius, for conveying motion, the fluid natural movements of dogs and horses and even cats. His subjects always seemed just about to do something: Dennis knew what, and conveyed it without even having to show it. 

The legendary horse-artist sketched this wee sleekit feline in the most fey, ghostlike poses, using just a few strokes of the pencil. Usually he was perched on the back or neck or rump of the hero, like so:

The song is something I learned in school, and it popped into my head today in the way long-forgotten songs suddenly will. I couldn't find one thing about it on the internet, which is rare - until I found some obscure message board from 2001 that quoted the lyrics, mostly correctly. This is the only place I've seen Towser as a dog name - usually it's Bowser, though who knows where THAT one got started. 

The complicated, twisting, braided strands of the name Grimalkin are about as weirdly mystical as anything I've seen lately. The different meanings of the word "malkin" (a cat, a low class woman, a weakling, a mop or a name) sound kind of like my autobiography. A faery cat that dwells in the Highlands, witches, familiars, Macbeth, being burned at the stake - how mystical is that? But all cats are magic. They wave their tails and walk by their wild lonesome and care not a fig what we think about them - never have, and never will.

Convenience Fish

Another cat video? YES!!

This time, in the snow. 

Harry The Happy Birthday Hyena: is THIS the worst infomercial ever?

When I found Perfect Polly, the plastic parakeet, I thought I had hit absolute rock-bottom, but she's nothing compared to this. . . thing. I can't see anyone actually wanting to buy one. I'd kill it if I was in the same room with it, and I'm normally pro-gun-control. I just don't get anyone designing and trying to market one of these. 

The year, not in review

The more it snows (tiddely pom)

For my friend David in Abbotsford - hell, my BEST friend David in Abbotsford, let's not spare the horses! Abbotsford was clobbered yesterday with an ice storm and widespread power outages, and I'm waiting to hear from him (which, with a power outage, I might not for a while). New Years might be a tad of a trial, but I hope not. Piglet to Pooh, I hope you're someplace warm.

Maui kitchen: view from the window

Up to now I haven't even posted any pictures from our vacation in Maui. We got back shortly before  Christmas, and it was the biggest bummer. . . I mean, to have to suddenly get myself in some kind of mood for holly-jollity, when all I'd been doing was soaking my brains in guava and turning them into a quivering green jelly. I'd gotten into "oh, I'll do it after Hawaii" mode, leaving stuff undone, which is not my usual compulsive way. And we were hosting this year, doing the turkey, etc. etc. So things had piled up nastily, making for a rough homecoming. It's not that I didn't want to be home. I just wanted QUIET, and that's not what you get at Christmas. I wasn't ready for something I didn't want to be ready for to begin with. It was not dread so much as total disorientation, the bends I usually get after going away, only worse. I did not even have time to look at any of the hundred or so videos I took, or the photos Bill took, which I still haven't seen.

So today. . . still feeling fried, but having survived Christmas and Boxing Day and a few more days after that, I started looking at my trove. I published this one mainly because of the incredible bird song on it, along with audible yelling and arguing among the staff working for the condo. I stood in the kitchen and shot it out the window when the birds were at their noisy peak. I make an appearance in this, looking just dreadful, with no makeup on and bedroom hair. Oh well. Does it matter, in sweet Hawaii? No, it does not. It's a no-bra zone, as a friend of mine once said. This was a sentimental journey for us, the fifth time we've gone to the same part of Maui (Kihei), and we were amazed at how little it had changed, even down to the restaurants and menus (Aloha Lunch Plate: coconut prawns by the ocean!). But it was bittersweet, because we know we'll never be back. Between health issues (for both of us) and money issues (check), we just can't do holidays like that any more. And the cat was so heavily traumatized by being boarded (even in a luxury cat hotel) that we can't imagine putting him through that again. 

I am likely to post at least a few of the slew of videos, once I get them figured out. I hate people posting their expensive holiday videos, wagging their asses at me, so this is my revenge.

Random acts of weirdness

Plastic Polly: The Perfect Parakeet Pet!

About this item

Disclaimer: While we aim to provide accurate product information, it is provided by manufacturers, suppliers and others, and has not been verified by us. See our

The As Seen on TV Perfect Polly Pet is the charming new motion-activated bird that comes to life whenever you walk into the room. His tail feathers move from side to side as he sings, and his head turns, as well.

This life-sized motion-activated pet features details so realistic, only you will know it's not real. This Perfect Polly parakeet comes with a perch, or let him sit right on your finger. Listen to him chirp and enjoy beautiful bird songs in your home without the mess and upkeep of a real pet bird.

This As Seen on TV pet comes with a one-year warranty. As Seen on TV Perfect Polly:
Perfect Polly parakeet has lifelike details

Turns on and off

Most popular bird
Tail moves
Sings and chirps
Head turns

Life size
Motion-activated parakeet
1-year warranty
As Seen on TV

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE. . .

Blogger's Post-Scream: I love infomercials - As Seen on TV is a kind of religion for me - but this has to be one of the stupidest things. . . I mean. The announcer seems to be telling us that people will treat a twitching hunk of green plastic like a PET. People coo over it. They kiss it. They hold it on their finger (and from the reviews I've seen, you really have to HOLD it on your finger with your thumb, or it will fall off). The narration becomes more "wha - ??" by the second. There are fake birds out there that look a damn sight better than this one, and even a fake parrot that "parrots" back everything you say to it (a parlour-trick item that has been around since the 1980s). This thing just. . . turns its head. Its little plastic head with the creepy seam on it. Franken-bird. The main advantage of it, they tell us, is that it doesn't crap. Well, of course not! Because it doesn't eat, either. Think of the savings. This breakthrough product could lead the way towards Perfect Doggy, Perfect Kitty, and even Perfect Kiddy, a child who never eats or craps or sasses back, or grows up for that matter. Perfectly plastic. 

AMAZING UPDATE! I was delighted to discover that the latest review from my favorite YouTuber, James White (Freakin' Reviews) is for Perfect Polly. He refers to it as the all-time dumbest item on As Seen on TV, and I have to agree. But he made a very cute video about it, in which he proves once and for all that this noisy piece of green plastic is truly useless. The best part is when his golden retriever runs off with it in her mouth. 

I highly recommend James White's channel if you want to see some quality stuff in the vast, seething swamp that is YouTube. It has truly become a den of iniquity, a shadow of its enchanting, eccentric former self. The more it burgeons, the lower it sinks. 

But never mind all that! White is serious about what he does, evaluates each item in detail, re-evaluates them later on for durability, presents a wide variety of items from useful to downright bizarre -  but is also affable, charming, both serious and funny, NOT a grandstander, fair and human (changing his mind about mocking those awful artificial veneers because poor people with severe dental problems might be able to use them), and altogether the kind of guy you'd like to take home to Mother.

I had only the most platonic feelings for this man - he's of son-ly years, after all - until he did a devastating review of My Pillow, featuring him lying in bed in a semi-lit room. I don't for one minute think that he was trying to look seductive. He just couldn't help himself. He isn't beefcake, but he's in pretty darn good shape, and. . . I guess at my age you're not allowed to notice these things. 

Never the twain. . .

Holly Jolly!

Victorian Christmas cards: deeply bizarre