My gecko encounter on Maui

This might just be my favorite of the hundred or so videos I took on Maui in December. This gecko was so majestic, and so huge, that he might not even have been a gecko. He might have been an anole, a similar-looking creature which grows to twice the size. I'm trying to figure out if this one had sticky pads on its toes. What do you think? It might be an anole, after all, but he looked like velvet, and regarded me with what seemed like intelligent eyes. OK, I know that's fanciful, but he was just adorable, and stayed for a long time (again, most un-gecko-like: most of them are seen only for a split-second as they dart back into a crack in the wall). The creature had a tail so long it wouldn't even fit in the frame, and was always partially hidden behind something. I'm still trying to figure out the size of it - at least a foot long nose-to-tail, perhaps longer. Geckos run four, six inches or so. As a kid I loved loved LOVED reptiles and amphibians, had a chameleon (actually, an anole), a fire newt, and a whole collection of frogs, toads and turtles, not to mention a snake or two. I longed for a salamander, but never found one. This gecko would have sent me into rhapsodies of joy. I just had to wait for it, I guess, though waiting more than 50 years for something can be tiring.

When my cat is sad

Enchanted Doll Fantasy

Do your ears hang low?

Or does any other part of your body? There's an infomercial for that. I've had a run of them lately - and they're great material for gifs, such as these (below) demonstrating what happens when you use these fabulous whatever-they-ares - earring lifters or whatever. MagicBax! They're just a special backing for pierced earrings that holds the earring more firmly in place, but as far as I'm concerned, such products already exist, and you can get them at Dollarama or Dollar Tree for a buck or so.

These look very uncomfortable to me, as they're a sort of bulky metal thing. But oh, the women using them look ecstatic! One of the major existential problems of their lives (how to hold their earrings on) has been solved forever.

I'm reminded, for some reason, of the old Playtex bra commercials, demonstrating the power of the bra "to lift and separate". Digging a little deeper into this strange topic, I find dozens or maybe even hundreds of videos of "how to wear pierced earrings without piercing your ears". The one I just looked at, just too absurd to re-post, had an attractive-looking young woman literally wrapping flesh-colored adhesive tape around her earlobes - like those thick fabric bandages you used to see - and sticking the earring through it. It was - I can't speak. She said, "Oh, girls, this is FABULOUS! If you brush your hair over it, it's even better!" My God.

The injured look was never my thing, but maybe it would be OK if seen from far away, like on the catwalk or competing in a pageant or something. Not likely to happen to me any time soon.

I have a ton of earrings collected and given to me over decades, and the rare time I try to wear them, I can't find my left earlobe at all - it seems to have shrunk, for some reason - and the hole in it is even harder to locate. If I do manage to get a backing over the post, it won't come off. Once my husband had to take pliers and wire cutters to remove one that had somehow got bent out of shape.

Someone once told me the sure-fire way to remove an earring backing from a stubborn wire was to coat the post in lube.

I could make a joke here, but I guess I won't.

Maui: from day to dusk

Night falls incredibly fast in the tropics. No way could I capture it, but I tried! Once I had brought all my videos home for editing, I realized I had in fact filmed through a keyhole, resulting in a postage stamp. 

But for all that, the videos stir some memories of a heavenly-sweet time. It's likely to be our last "big" trip for a while, perhaps forever. I did not realize until I got home that the sassy black birds I kept seeing and hearing were mynah birds. Every time I saw one it was singing a different song, with its uncanny ability to mimic everyone and everything around it. It was even more surprising to find out that this was yet another non-native species brought in to control pests, resulting in even worse problems (levelling fields of crops, plastering the roofs of condos with guano). Still, I loved the guys, screeching, strutting around and owning the place.

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