The worst ad in television history

This thing is just unbelievably primitive, from the screechy adult-pretending-to-be-a-kid to the brain-dead-sounding Dad, and graphics that look like they were cut out with garden shears. But Colorforms were what we all played with, and nobody complained. 

The Six Million Dollar Troll

VHTF 3.5" VTG DAM TAILED TROLL W/SWIVEL HEAD, NEW SALT & PEPPER HAIR

Item Information
Condition:
Used

“He is in great shape for being almost 50 yrs old”

History:
2 offers

Price:
US $1,499.99
+US $60.00 shipping 

Approximately C $1,920.59 (including shipping)

BLOGGER'S LAMENT: I've had some doubts about getting back into trolls. What started as a happy thing ended up with joining Facebook groups in which people display collections of hundreds or even thousands of expensive, vintage trolls, or trolls they just happened to pick up at a flea market (a couple hundred, usually) that just happen to include several treasures like the phenomenal find pictured above.

Like, a two thousand-dollar troll! It's nice, for sure. He's cute. Looks in great shape, maybe even mint, as if someone bought him and just put him away somewhere back in 1961. But I just don't have two thousand dollars for a troll! I have to eat.

I started off enjoying my troll hobby, and I still do, to some extent, but the experts are ruining it. I posted some photos on Facebook of troll clothes I knitted, and hair I've replaced, and I can feel the shock and disdain - shock that I'd have the nerve to even do such a thing when the standards are too high for me to reach, disdain because I'm a newbie and have to sit back for at least two years before contributing anything at all.

My thing was making yarn hair that doesn't look like yarn, or is at least pretty enough to fool the eye (or *I* thought so):

These seemed OK to me until I posted some, and the comment was, "It looks like yarn". Yarn isn't used on trolls. Tibetan cashmere, perhaps - mohair from the pelt of a yak, fleece from the Golden Ram of Jason and the Argonauts - but not yarn. Yarn is for an old Raggedy Ann doll left moldering in the attic. It seems there are certain rules as to what you can use. Which is funny, because I've seen things like steel wool, wires, shells, fake flowers, quartz crystals, snow globes, and other unlikely substances for hair replacement. But don't use yarn because it's for amateurs and grandmas, because it means you don't know what you're doing, and even if you're doing it for fun and just to share with the group and not try to sell or trade, there is a certain standard to be maintained.

The group "in-talks" a lot, meaning a lot of obscure troll jargon. WHY do people do this, in any and every field of endeavour? It's to make people who know less than they do feel like know-nothings, or to show off JUST HOW MUCH MORE they know about the subject than you do. So you are suddenly in the position of supplicant, of meekly asking questions and waiting for the Big Oom-pahs to answer rather than joining the conversation and actually saying anything.

I'd say the internet has poisoned everything, but maybe not, maybe it has always been this way. Sashaying around, ass-wagging and showing off seems to be intrinsic to human nature, and it stinks. I am SICK of it. OK, it looks like yarn, but is THIS any better?

This is what troll hair is s'posed-ta look like, not long waterfalls of de-stranded yarn fibres. But they're not collecting MY trolls, are they? Aren't they interested in what I like? I don't know.

I guess this is a whole lot of complaining, but it just galls me that the "does not belong" stamp that was placed on my forehead at birth is still so much in evidence. Even when having Fun with Trolls. The hidden agenda in these groups is that you have to be a professional doll-collector/restorer who knows and uses all the jargon, in spite of repeated insistence that it's "just for fun". I even read someone say that they think more members should contribute and get involved, rather than just sit back to be entertained. 

(I can't remember if I posted this already, so here it is again, or still).

Some days feel like this

Triggered: why do I have this gun to my head?

I have been sitting here for hours, or perhaps months or years, trying to make point form order out of a seething ocean. And I know it's not going to work.

I was pretty surprised, when I finally sat down to make "the list", that I had already done so. The file even had the same name, though it was created last year. I have no memory at all of making it, but it was for a post just like this one, which at the last minute I deleted.

I don't quite know what it is - perhaps the need to vomit up the toxins of years of sexual abuse, triggered by the MeToo movement which has aroused more dragons than it has slain. But I know my dragon. The abuse went on for years, and the stage, the set, the backdrop of it, the theatre in which it was played out, was in the hands of (in the words of Baby Jane Hudson) my very own sister! 

Pat was always just there - much older than me (13 years), flamboyant, brilliantly histrionic - her followers, her ubiquitous coterie of admirers, thought so anyway - and smart, but in a way that could go straight to the jugular. She  felt entitled to say anything she wanted and was shocked if you objected ("whaaaaaat?"), and never apologized. And I was infantilized, except when it came to her pimping me out at her parties, being fully aware that I was drunk and being groped by numerous married men. At age 15, I was the mascot, passed around with impunity. Fair game.

I can only hit the highlights, or lowlights, of the grinding game of her presence in my life. There were some favorite sayings (sort of like the sayings of Jesus - or she may have thought so):

“Margaret, you’re weird.”

“Margaret, you’re wired.”

“Margaret, you’re crazy.” Usually said with a cocked eyebrow and a cool little shrug of contempt.

High points of my life were marked with high sarcasm. When I got married to a man I loved, she had this to say at the reception:

"Well, I guess now you think you've got your whole life figured out."

When I was juggling two toddlers during a visit, she watched me, not helping out at all, then said with the expression of someone imagining someone's terminal disease, "Sometimes I try to imagine what your days are like."

Oh, it goes on, and it WILL become a litany and a list if I don't watch out. When I played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady for a community theatre group, she honored me by attending. Afterwards, backstage, she stood apart, saying nothing, while everyone else jumped around me like puppies and my husband wept with pride. Finally when I looked at her with an agonized, "Please, can't you say SOMETHING?" expression, she arched her cool little eyebrow and said in a cool little voice, 

"You weren't boring."

So I wasn't boring. I wasn't awful! Good to know. The weird thing is, I was supposed to be OK with the remark, even grateful for her assessment. Over the next several days of her visit, she minutely dissected my voice and all its flaws (she had tossed away a singing career with too much booze and sex. No  kidding). Not boring, but obviously pretty terrible, and I think she was incredulous I had the nerve to get up there at all.

I just deleted a huge chunk of this, because we haven't gotten to the abusive part yet. (Oh, let's put this one in! I made the mistake of saying I was taking clarinet lessons, and she said, "Are you going to tap dance at the same time?")

Other ripe cherries were spat, but you have the idea by now. When I told her I was anxious about moving to Vancouver and wasn't sure what would happen, she bored into my eyes and calmly said, "I guess you'll just self-destruct."

OK, that's enough, now we have to get to the "real" stuff, and the reason she keeps pouring back into my brain like a landslide of hot rocks. When I was 15 or so, I was shy, chubby, not very attractive, but Pat would let me come to her parties. Her parties were piss-ups full of married men and loud falling-down-drunk women. They were up-against-the-wall affairs, and I was expected to think it was a privilege to go to them.

When I first encountered the expression "Walpurgis night", I immediately knew what it meant. Barely getting to the bathroom in time to barf was all part of the proceedings, as was feeling an alien penis grind against my bottom in the dark. I was supposed to like it, and the horrible, horrible thing is that I DID like it, or some of it. Once, her boy friend's best friend (in his 30s and married) started "dating" me, taking me to movies and such. Things were getting out of hand with him. When I finally went to my Big Sister and told her I was frightened of what was happening with him, she said, and I quote, "It doesn't hurt to have a little smooch and a snuggle after a date."

Pimped me out, she did. I never had a term for it before, but now I know. Her own drinking habits were legendary at that time, so she felt I should mirror them. I learned the lesson too well, had to join AA in my mid-30s, and horrified the entire family (especially Pat, who said "I'm just so thankful it never happened to me").

I would say she was not a happy woman, and she wasn't, but neither was she unhappy, for there was just something missing in her. She did not have a fully-formed conscience, and was completely incapable of real intimacy with another human being. She could slash and burn, oh yes, and she did, many times. She collected exotic and intriguing men like pelts, including an indigenous Mohawk man named Clare Brant who went on to become a much-revered psychiatrist on a reserve. That engagement didn't last too long, for on one of her many trips to Germany she got pregnant (by which boy friend is unknown). I have seldom heard of such a jaw-dropping act of betrayal. But on she went, a human wood-chipper, on to the next engagement, another man to "process" and spit out.

There were other betrayals, horrible ones, such as the time I trusted her with some very sensitive information about my father and what he had done to me as a child. She immediately called my parents, blurted out the whole thing, and started a World War III which only ended when my parents were put under the ground.

But it is all so odd. SHE is so odd, but so arrogant that she somehow twists it around and accuses everyone else of being odd, or sick, or crazy. When I began to read and hear about narcissism, her astonishing behaviour began to make sense, the coterie of quasi-friends, the continual gaslighting. But so many pieces still don't fit.

What I have always wondered:

Why Germany? Why was she so obsessed with it? Who would be attracted to that place, less than twenty years after the war? Why Munich (given its dark political significance)? Why did she come back pregnant when she was about to get married to a man she supposedly loved? Did she know who the father was? Why Germany at all? No one in the family had the slightest connection to it. What was all that political radicalism all about, why did she seem to think the wrong side had won? Why did she cultivate certain key people and collect them like trophies? What was that supposed to do for her self-worth?

I had hoped to fashion this into something other than a rant, but it's broken pieces, and you can't put a broken heart or a broken brain back together. It's too late for that. I want to let this whole thing go, and I don't know how to do it. Incredibly, in her late 70s, she still hasn't run out of admirers that she can whip around her little finger. I've found pictures of her with her Thomas Merton Society, and she still looks like the favored child. Merton is just about the creepiest figure who ever lived, a monk who broke his vows and had a selfish affair with a woman engaged to be married to someone fighting in Vietnam. Is there an echo in here? Do engagements mean nothing at all? What about morals? Isn't it also true Merton fathered a child out of wedlock and pretended it didn't exist? Infants who carry your DNA are bad PR, apparently, and disposable (as she must have known).

Such a hero. But I can see why she loves him.

Whenever I write something like this, I delete it and go back to the quirky stuff I usually post. I do enjoy that stuff, but what about the poison in my guts, do I just carry it? What is being a writer all about? Not about this, evidently. The one time I really poured it all out like lava, three long-term followers bailed in quick succession. Let's go back to the funny, weird gifs of silicone babies, shall we? So I don't know. 

My mother once said about Pat (and seldom did she divulge anything so personal, as she was mostly indifferent to me), "She's just talking about herself." Mum also had an older sister, unmarried, flamboyant, often cruel, who had gone through men like water. In her later life her drinking went out of control, and eventually she committed suicide. She wasn't found until weeks or months later because nobody missed her, and my parents had to go to New York to bury her because there was nobody else to do it.

I don't say it will happen, but if she does die alone, I think I will give about as much of a rip as she always has about me: no more, no less.  It may be the only possible way that I can bury her.

THE KICKER. There had to be a chaser! I had been so shut out of my family that I didn't even receive notice of my parents' deaths. For some reason, one day I began to look for my mother's obituary online and found it. Read the thing through. Read it again. It was interesting reading, because there was a hole in it. My name wasn't on it! According to my mother, or likely Pat who was entrusted to write such things, not  only was I shut out of the  family and ostracized: I had never been born. It was the strangest thing. 

But I knew in my heart that NOTHING my children could do would cause me to do such a jackassed, lame-assed, plain stupid thing. My kids could be axe-murderers, they could kill ME with an axe, and of course they would be in my obituary. It's called having a sense of reality.

So you see, those forces of darkness did not win, after all. But how I wish, how devoutly I wish I could just kill her off.

Colonel Sanders and the lie detector test

I don't remember anything about this commercial. I DO remember TV ads with the Colonel in them. He was the company, in a way, and without his jovial presence the product would have landed with a thud.

But this ad wasn't his sort of thing, it wasn't. It's kind of surreal, or at least weird and menacing. They're trying to torture the good Colonel into giving away his Secret Recipe of Eleven Herbs and Spices (two of which are salt and pepper). 

It seems to me KFC (as it's called now, no doubt to get rid of that dreaded word "fried", even though the recipe is pretty much the same) used to taste pretty good, and it seems to me that now, what with all the improvements over the years, it tastes pretty dreadful. It isn't just the taste but the rubbery texture, the grease spurting every time you bite into it. The relative tastelessness. No doubt in the old days, they used real chickens, the kind that cluck and scratch and run around in a pen. Now they use rubbery chicken machines, clones or hybrids crossed with vulcanized rubber, their breasts so overinflated they fall over and can't walk any more.

Chickens which don't even know what the light of day is.

Another thing. It's hard to even GET any KFC now when you go to the takeout counter. Actual chicken is relegated to one item on the menu at the very bottom. Everything else is wraps and quesadillas and nuggets and whatever-else (who looks? I want CHICKEN). If you do order chicken, and they always look at you strangely if you do, you wait a very long time, and then all you get is (as they call it) "brown meat". You can't get white meat unless you pay extra, and sometimes it isn't available at all. I wish I knew what happened to it.

There have been a number of people "playing" Col. Sanders in ads recently, and they're all idiots. The design on the "bucket" (read: sign, as they don't do buckets any more) is now more jolly-looking, though Col. Sanders never looked like that. He was a crabby old man, and people liked him that way. He had a unique method of quality control, and it was most innovative, not to mention very effective. He travelled around the country, randomly dropping in to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and ordering a bucket of chicken, which he would go through methodically piece by piece and analyze for this quality or that. Then he would eat it. His favorite was the top of the wing, and I have to agree with him there.

The RackTrap - As Seen on TV

I watched this video in disbelief, and then I watched it again (in disbelief). What's weird about it is that I can't find reference to this product anywhere else. Anywhere. I took Google by the heels and turned it upside-down and shook it, and nothing came out - and that almost never happens. So, like Perfect Polly the chirping plastic parrot and that stuffed laughing hyena thing, this looks like an idea that went straight down the sewer without a detour.

"The Rack Trap" itself is the wrong name. It's just. . . wrong. The whole product is "off", in that it's something that just could not work, period, but to call it The Rack Trap. . . what does it mean? I saw a couple of other things with that name on YouTube, but they had to do with deer antlers. You know. . . a rack.

I'm well aware "rack" can be used as slang for a woman's breasts, but it's kind of obscure. You're more likely to hear "boobs", "tits", or the more genteel "girls". "Rack" has the wrong sound to it - you should get some semblance of the product's purpose from its name. "Trap" means - what? It can mean a, well, a trap, but what else? 

This is, in case you don't want to sit through a pretty excruciating video, a little flat purse you stick in your bra. That's right. It has a zipper in it. There is a list of all the things you can "hide" in this little flat purse:

Money
Credit Cards
Bandaid
Mints
Gum
License
Tissues
Bus Pass
Flash Drive 
MP3  Player
Gym Card
Condoms
Business Card

In the video, there's no looking down your neckline and fishing around to find the top of your bra cup and sliding the "trap" in and jiggling it around to get it in the right place. The lady sort of slaps it on her chest, and that's it. It looks as if she isn't even wearing a bra, which would be kind of silly because then The Rack Trap would just fall on the floor.

Maybe it's like Snoopy's dog house or something, or a clown car, where you can't believe how much can fit in such a small space. More likely, if this is anything like even the most miniaturized version of a woman's purse, stuff would accumulate, makeup and keys and tampons and mirrors and sunscreen and earrings and hair scrunchies and press-on nails and - you get it, by now. 

It would be like trying to fit a bumpy baseball in your bra cup. Oh, great. Such a smart look! "Jesus, what's that lumpy thing under your shirt?" Soon it would weigh 20 pounds or more. And trying to get stuff out of it in public? Are you kidding? Here she is, head bent (in a dark restaurant, say), rummaging around in there, unable to find it, losing it down her front and having to lift up the bottom of her blouse to retrieve it . . . It's not a good look.

I think it's deliberate that the women in the ad are wearing thin, clingy fabrics instead of thick sweaters. The Rack Trap is supposed to just sort of melt into your body, I guess, so it doesn't show through silk or sheer tank tops. It does appear to vanish when the women slap it against their chests, but I just can't see it happening that way. When they pull them out, they do it so fast you can hardly follow it. It seems to just come out of the thin air, as if there's some sort of photographic trick going on.

I wonder who they hire for these infomercials, who they get to effuse and enthuse about this stuff. I am sure for the most part they haven't used the product, which gives those testimonials their hilariously fake quality. "It doesn't even show!" one woman cries, the assumption being that it certainly WOULD show, like any fat little zippered thing you crammed in your brassiere.

AFTER-THE-THOUGHT: One more thing that bothers me. Doesn't it sound like they're saying "rat trap"? Rat trap, rat trap, rat trap. The more I watch it, the more it sounds like that.

I AM A MIGHTY BATTLE SHIP by David West

After a long period of illness and near-incapacitation, David astounded me with one of his best poems, written only last night. He gave me permission to share it here. I am so hoping this will ignite more poems, as he has a unique voice, and is my closest friend.

I AM A MIGHTY BATTLE SHIP

YES. A mighty battle ship
Grey
Taken a lot of hits and near misses
Done some damage in return

My rudder cable is jammed
I travel by digression

Bunker oil marks my path
We are working to seal the leaks

It is a race against time
And tide

Two forward compartments
Are sealed by my order
Were filling with flood and screams of those left behind

I have counter-flooded to keep
The decks even at a level
No dramatic going down here

Yet there is no homecoming for us
No homeport to take refuge
and refit

Sooner or later we go under the cold dark waves
I’ll stand my watch,
I’ll not fear
For many before us have gone down
to meet the Old Grey Widow Maker

Constant as ocean, wind,
and tide

—David West

Turtle magic

My mother told me

Three six nine, the goose drank wine.

The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.

The line broke, the monkey got choked

And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!

Clap pat clap your hand, pat it on your partner's hand

Right hand.

Clap pat clap pat clap your hand. Cross it with your left arm.

Pat you partner's left palm.

Clap pat, clap your hand, pat your partner's right palm

With your right palm again.

Clap slap, clap your hand, slap your thighs and sing a little song.

My mother told me, if I was goody.

That she would buy me a rubber dolly.

My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,

Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.

Three six nine, the goose drank wine.

The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.

The line broke, the monkey got choked

And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

Clap clap (clap your hands and prepare to pat)

Pat (take your right arm put your partner's right palm with your right palm)

Clap (take your hand back and clap)

Pat (take your right arm, cross your right arm with your left arm. Pat

Your partner's left palm with your left palm)

Clap (take your hand back and clap)

Pat (take your right arm, cross your left arm pat your partner's right

Palm with your right palm.)

Clap (now back, with a clap)

Slap (take the pats of your palms and slap your thighs and watch the

Fun materialize as you sing this little song

My mother told me, if I was goody.

That she would buy me a rubber dolly.

My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,

Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.

Three six nine, the goose drank wine.

The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.

The line broke, the monkey got choked

And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!

Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!

Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!

Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.

Rubber baby buggy bumpers

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.

POSTBLOGSCRIPT. Just a tiny bit about Sun Rubber dolls, which I had never heard of before. These were a particularly creepy form of soft rubber doll, the earlier models being squeaky toys such as you'd give your dog to play with. Many of them drank and wet. 

The shortest history I can find (because who wants a long history of a rubber toy company?) is this:

Sun Rubber Toys of Barberton, Ohio was founded in 1923, in the midst of a rubber boom for the area, as wartime rationing ended for companies. The Sun Rubber Toy Company produced rubber toy and squeak dolls, including many licensed characters like Gerber Baby dolls, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck.

I am right now trying to fathom the ramifications of a rubber boom. When I think of the fact that condoms used to be made out of rubber, before they were made out of whatever-they-'re-made-out-of-now, "rubber boom" takes on whole new dimensions. I am also reminded of poor George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (basically, a festive Christmas movie about a man on the verge of suicide reflecting on how useless and pointless his entire life has been), who could not serve during WWII because he caught a chill saving his brother from drowning and sacrificed an eardrum. He had to stick around town ringing curfew every night around 6:00 p.m., which was late for old George, and take part in various drives - drives being not urges, but great efforts to beat the bushes and gather up something you need for the war effort, like - I'm guessing here - rags, tin, glass, rubber. Yes, there were rubber drives, and George was in charge of them. 

So I don't know how Sun Rubber Co. held on as long as it did. If there were rubber drives going on during the war, then rubber dollies would surely have to be melted down. A couple of the dolls pictured here look like they HAVE been partially melted down, or at least run over. 

The clapping song - I never could make any sense of the lyrics, and to learn the clapping sequence you'd have to slow it down so far it would make no sense. Yet we DID use "my mother told me" as a clapping rhyme, with a slightly different tune. We were singing this long before the record came out, and I suspect it's old, if not very old.

I am now reminded of something else, damn it, because I don't feel like transcribing this and the only reference I can find is in a book! While researching his masterpiece opera Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin visited Southern black churches, "one-room shacks called praise houses". With typical Gershwin brashness, he didn't just sit in the back row but jumped right into the middle of their rituals. "He did not hesitate to join in as the congregation sang and clapped their hands and engaged in a local ritual called shouting. It was an activity that involved not just the voice but also the slapping of one's chest, knees, and thighs in complex rhythmic patterns." To make a long story short, George kicked ass at shouting and astounded everyone. This complex folk-rhythm seeped into his music in all sorts of ways. And I see hints of the shouting tradition in the pat-clap-pat-slap of The Clapping Song. History hides inside the enigma of music.

Kill me now

Bentley sleeps with his eyes open

Much as I love cats, there is something primitive, almost reptilian about their eyes. When Bentley is at a certain stage of sleep, his eyes are slits with the pupils rolled down (not up), with a glazed look. Sometimes his eyes are wide open like that. It's disturbing. I think predators have to be ready every second for the next kill, and thus don't even have to open their eyes to wake up.

I found a big mistake!

We all love Rocky and Bullwinkle, right? No? Okay. That was just a rhetorical question. I have no idea if you like them or not, or even know who they are. But I found something interesting on a YouTube video featuring the running gag which appeared on the show every week: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" In every case, Bullwinkle the magician pulls the head of a wild animal out of the hat and responds with some quip like, "No doubt about it. I'd better get another hat." (A different wild animal each time.) Then Rocky says, "And now for something we hope you'll really like!" This gif is the full non-audio version of the segment, about ten seconds long.

j

But if you keep watching it, it becomes apparent that at about the six-second mark, something very strange happens. Hint: keep your eye on the lower left-hand corner.

One of the main characters. . . disappears. Rocky vanishes. He just isn't there any more.

Slowing this down, it looks even more bizarre. What were the animators thinking? 

Then witness Bullwinkle making his usual smart remark to an empty stage! There's a great big wall of nothing where Rocky should be. He's looking down and talking to nobody.

This is followed by Rocky's cheery announcement, "And now here's something we hope you'll really like!" It's likely this little bit of animation was reused in all these segments to save money.

But notice that it bears little or no resemblance to the original set. The colours are more saturated, the curtains look strange - sort of gathered into folds - and there's a big black "something" above Rocky's head. There was some sort of emblem or crest on the curtains behind Bullwinkle's head that appeared to have a B on it. This, whatever it is, looks nothing like that. It looks like they got some three-year-old to draw their backgrounds for them with a black crayon. This was some sort of cut-rate animation sweat shop. We didn't see just how amateurish and ugly all this was, because we all loved Rocky and Bullwinkle so much.

Well, I did.

Oopsy. I was wrong! This is the Rocky announcement at the end of one of the other magician bits, and it's totally different. The curtains are green, blocky, no gathers, and have some sort of thing on them like an upside-down hot water bottle (if you know what THAT is). But pay attention to Rocky, and you'll see they have repeated the animation from the first one verbatim, except for little details like the tail. In the first one, it looks like an animated slug with no features on it at all. But the second one - pay attention to his feet, how they lurch back and forth in a way that is horribly cheap and unnatural. In fact, I can almost see the bottom line of the curtains showing through his little feet. 

Disney it ain't. Not even Rankin-Bass. And yet, these guys were wildly popular in their day, in the style of early '60s animation. We were much less critical as kids.