Felix Nadar spinning in his chair

List of Books to Read Before You Die

This is the best thing I've ever SEEN!

This is just one of those things that I need to watch. Really, what good does it do if I "keep up" with all the wretchedness of the world? What particle of difference does it make? Well, I'll tell you. It makes me feel hopeless and powerless. But hey, isn't that something we simply can't do without? Watch the cats. Just watch them.

Sweet taste of Spam!

Rare pearls of Spam found during late-night  trawl of a Facebook page called Weird History:

Gift Pearl i want to share my amazing experience with the greatest spell caster Dr Harry my husband was cheating on me and when i found out we had a fight which lead to him filling for a divorce i cried and fell sick when i was searching about love quotes online i saw people talking about him and his great work whose case was similar to mine they left his contact info i contacted him and he told me not to worry that after 24hrs he will cancel the divorce and be back to me after i did everything he asked me to do to my greatest surprise the next day evening it was my husband he knelt down begging me to accept him back,thank you once again Dr harry you are indeed a blessing. You can email him on drharryken555@gmail. Com WhatsApp +2348105326853.

Gift Pearl I was going crazy when my husband left me and my two kids for another woman 2 weeks ago after 17years of marriage. We had a lovely marriage but he started a relationship with a co worker who chased after him. He is living away OUR home and refuses to talk to me or to come home. I was devastated and am finding it hard to cope . I wish I did not love him and that I could move on but I can't. I starting to feel ill. I have begged him to come home all to no avail. I became very worried and needed help. As I was browsing through the internet one day, I came across a website that suggested that Dr harry can help solve marital problems, restore broken relationships and so on. So, I felt I should give him a try. I contacted him and he did a spell for me. 4days later, my husband came to me and apologized for the wrongs he did and promise never to do it again. Ever since then, everything has returned back to normal. I and my family are living together happily again.. All thanks to Dr harry. If you need a spell caster that can cast a spell that truly works, I suggest you contact him. He will not disappoint you. if you have any problem contact him, I give you 100% guarantee that he will help you, Email him at: drharryken555@gmail. com, you can call or Add him on Whatsapp +2348105326853

Gift Pearl I am from sweden, I have great joy in me as i am writing this testimony about the great man called Dr harry When my lover left me i never taught that i will be able to get her back after all she has put me through, But i am so happy that after the interference of Dr harry i was able to get my lover back after 48hours and i can proudly to say, that who ever need help in getting there lover back should contact Dr harry on these contact details below for proper understanding of what i have just witness. And i promise that he will help you as he help me.
YOU ALSO NEED SOLUTION IN THE FOLLOWING PROBLEM,CONTACT HIM AS WELL.
1) If you want your EX back.
(2) if you always have bad dreams.
(3) You want to be promoted in your office.
(4) You want women/men to run after you.
(5) If you want a CHILD.
(6) You want to be RICH.
(7) You want to tie your husband/wife to be yours forever.
(8) If you need financial assistance.
(9) How you been SCAMMED and you want to recover you lost money.
once again the email is:drharryken555@. com or WhatsApp:+2348105326853

Why is it still OK to mock mental illness?

This is extremely painful for me to write, but I’ll try. Today I saw a YouTube video by a very entertaining duo of filmmakers who make videos of things and show them in extreme slow motion. They often use the word “crazy” to describe them, which is a loose term that can mean practically anything (including mental illness), but they also frequently use the term “mental”. “Look at that! That is totally mental.”

I hear this kind of expression daily, and if I say anything about it I’m pretty much attacked for being oversensitive or having “no sense of humor”. But this casually-used slur against hurting, needing people is done without any thought that it might be disrespectful, let alone abusive.

Can I explain? Daily, I hear people react to news items of over-the-top behaviour with “oh, he’s just a whack job.” “She’s a nut bar, what can you expect?” Then, cheek-by-jowl, we see news items about the rising tide of suicides and “mental breakdowns” and PTSD and being “triggered” and society's noble attempt at “reducing the stigma” (never getting rid of it – that’s too much to ask).

What is going on here? Many think it’s “progress” and enlightenment, but as someone who has lost several dear ones to suicide, I don’t think so. “Reach out for help” is the new “thoughts and prayers”, and it means almost nothing because in most cases the “help” just isn’t there. The most that desperate families can expect for their suicidal teen is a wait list or a misdiagnosis (and people with mental illness are misdiagnosed an average of FIVE TIMES before the medical community gets it right), or poor treatment or mismedication, or even moralizing, while at the same time they have to endure the “whack job” mentality, the daily heedless slurs that still prevail in a culture that only poses as compassionate.

The “reach out for help” isn’t a bad thing, and I’m not saying “don’t do it”. But it is a bandaid solution and a way of dismissing an uncomfortable topic, so you can entertain the illusion that you have "raised awareness", and thus done something important. But it gets worse. "Reach out for help" completely puts the onus on the sufferer to make themselves better. Depression is immobilizing by nature, and perhaps you’d be surprise to learn that the heavy stigma and general contempt for mental illness that still lurks under all the trite phrases causes people to try to hide it.

I am sure no one will be too interested in reading this, as it will be seen as “negative” and not acknowledging the great strides society has recently made. "Brave" celebrities come forward and "admit" they have suffered from depression (admission being a form of confession). This does not help the cause and only helps us distance ourselves. It is only very recently that anyone even thought of having a walk or fund-raising for “mental health”. Ten years ago the very idea would have caused bafflement, even a bit of embarrassment. Why are we just now beginning to look at an “issue” which has ALWAYS affected the human race throughout its history? Why does mental illness still represent the last target of acceptable abuse?

GLEEP GLEEP

FUN FACTS from Wikipedia: Like other jays, the Steller's jay has numerous and variable vocalizations. One common call is a harsh SHACK-Sheck-sheck-sheck-sheck-sheck series; another skreeka! skreeka! call sounds almost exactly like an old-fashioned pump handle; yet another is a soft, breathy hoodle hoodle whistle. Its alarm call is a harsh, nasal wah. Some calls are sex-specific: females produce a rattling sound, while males make a high-pitched gleep gleep.

"The world is violent and mercurial": a quote in nine takes

"Can I leave the house like this?" A fat-shamed woman speaks

Older age brings with it some very strange goals, things you wouldn't ever have considered or even thought about before. Right now I am trying to train myself to go out of the house wearing shorts. I have lots and lots of pairs of shorts in all different sizes, left over from all my "thin periods" and "fat periods", though I always felt deep shame that I had to keep such a range of clothing and often just threw the fat clothes out.

I want to be able to go out, at least out of the house, with jelly-looking jiggly thighs, not that anyone cares in this age of 300-pound women in crop-tops with spaghetti straps and short-shorts that ride way up because of the fat. You see it every day, along with fat men whose entire bellies show because their shirts won’t stay down. The only alternative are “curtain” shirts like Daryll wears on those Save-on ads, the enormous tent-like shirt falling straight down from the fattest point of the belly.  To say the least, it is not a pretty sight, and life-threatening to boot (with people in their teens and 20s alarming me the most, 3-year-old children in tow and babies in the shopping cart). But no one cares or even thinks anything of it now. 

It has become such a new normal that, like texting while driving (or walking or getting married or having sex or giving birth, or attending a funeral), no one pays any attention to it any more. No one even sees it, because it's what people do now. If you're weird like me and don't even use a phone for anything except phoning, you are so far out of the orbit of the human condition that you often feel marooned in a kind of strange outworld of obsolescence. And God forbid you should say anything about any of this to upset the status quo, or you will be accused of being a hater or a "troll". 

But no one seems to know or remember what it was like to be fat-shamed at 132 pounds.

When I was growing up, being 10 pounds overweight was disgraceful, almost a crime, and you had to "go on Atkins” (now called “keto”, though it is the exact same thing. Last year it was "paleo", and no one knows yet what it will be next year). 

EVERYONE was obsessed with dieting and losing weight, and in high school I was stigmatized for being "too fat". I even overheard disparaging remarks about me, which people felt perfectly free to make because I was a sort of non-entity. When I was 16, my parents sent me to the doctor because I wouldn't come out of my room, and the doctor told me I needed to lose 30 pounds and "dress like the other girls do" (in miniskirts and hot pants) in order to attract a boy friend. I weighed somewhere around 140 pounds, which today I would just LOVE to weigh.

Throughout my teens, twenties, thirties, even forties, there were weight charts everywhere, in doctor’s offices, in women’s mags, in diet and exercise books and at every turn, and they were all the same: a rigid weight range according to height and frame size. My range was 120 – 135 pounds, with the implication that 135 was "too fat”. I dieted and dieted and dieted. The diets were ridiculous and often included alcohol, I guess to make them bearable. 

When I was nearer 120, I got masses of compliments from everyone, particularly from my older siblings' male friends, and was told I looked absolutely beautiful, totally transformed from the mess I used to be, and when I gained it all back – which I now know that 95% of people do after crash dieting, as your body clamours to pull itself out of an engineered famine – all the compliments just stopped. There was an embarrassed silence, and I felt drenched in shame. I had to get back on the dieting treadmill and try to beat my body back down again so I could be acceptable. I was sure I was the only person on earth who had ever had this problem, mainly because no one ever talked about it (because each person thought they were the only person on earth who had ever had this problem).

So is it any better now that fat is (supposedly) much more OK? What the hell happened to all those weight charts, and those ubiquitous booklets with those evil 10BX exercises, and measuring every morsel that went in your mouth and taking a tape measure to every conceivable body part and getting on the scale (and writing the number down) every single day? Even worse than that, looking in the mirror nude and concluding you were "fat" even at that magic number of 120 pounds.

The women's magazines were the worst: outlandish diets which told you exactly what to eat meal-by-meal each day of the week, so that you HAD to have exactly one half-scoop of low-fat cottage cheese, a canned peach half rinsed under the tap to remove all syrup, and a slice of dry melba toast for dinner, but ONLY on Saturday, to a total of maybe 300 calories. The diet would be followed on the next page with a recipe for a gooey, 3-layer, buttercream-frosted chocolate fudge cake. A recipe for bulimia, which fortunately I did not have (but could have - I believe society created that particular disease, which practically did not exist until the '70s).

I remember, almost with a sense of trauma, a horrible article featuring the model Cheryl Tiegs. This woman had the usual model's body type of 5"11" and perhaps 105 or 110 pounds. Though she reassured us that "not every woman can attain my weight level," she nonetheless provided a healthy weight-reduction diet (and a weight chart with height and frame size. She had no frame, so it was easy for her.) She talked about how important it was to enjoy your meals every day, and that food was important because it represented a "warm connection to life". (This is just one of those things I vividly remember, for some reason.) She then laid out what you should weigh (or COULD weigh if you were halfway serious about looking good). At five feet you should weigh no more than 100 pounds, and for every inch over five feet, you were allowed to add three pounds. This meant that my "acceptable" weight was 112. I hadn't weighed 112 since I was 14 years old.

The battle for me, right now, is “can I wear shorts outside?” Just that. Can I go out of the house in them? A huge step further: can I wear them to Walmart? Walmart is Fat City, as nasty people take surreptitious photos with their phones of fat, ill-dressed people, likely poor, that end up splattered all over social media. Though I am the only person who has ever mentioned this, or even noticed it, TV documentaries about obesity ALWAYS show very fat people waddling along the street without showing their faces. No one thinks this exploits anyone because they are, of course, "anonymous" and have no power of veto, so can freely be used as examples of "what not to be". What if you saw yourself being held up for such contemptuous (and potentially worldwide) ridicule? 

But the issue for me is: can I allow myself to show jiggly legs that are the product of losing and gaining and losing and gaining and losing and gaining? The emotional scarring has gone very deep from literal decades of damage, of hating myself because society told me I'd better hate myself until I lose that weight once and for all, keep it off forever without deviating a pound, and make myself acceptable to the world. 

I still feel funny and sort of uneasy putting on shorts, though I can now fit into the mid-range that every yo-yo dieter has in her wardrobe, along with unrealistically tiny things that I couldn't get my leg into all the way up to "size elephant". Sometimes, like the morbidly obese ladies sporting spaghetti strap tops, short-shorts and bare midriff, I just tell myself not to give a rip. Nobody else does. Nobody's looking, which is probably true (and a relief, actually, though older women often complain that they have become "invisible". Nothing would make me happier than to BE invisible.) 

It's the new normal, so I’m doing it anyway, and carrying myself as well as I can. I never really thought about how sad it is that a woman who may be overweight but isn't obese by any medical standard can't wear shorts. She just can't. You don't, when your legs aren't thin or firm, or if they feel jiggly when you walk. If you do wear them because it is insufferably hot, you stay in the house. 

I'm going out of the house in shorts now, realizing that no one really looked at me in the first place. Though I hated how I looked when I was young, I now see that - oh, I can't say it, so I will let the photos of my younger self tell the story. Do I really look fat in any of them?

EAT PIE

We are the World! (excerpt)

The earnestness with which people sang this lame little ditty is lamentable, but it's kind of an artifact of its times. Even Bob Dylan stood there, not really singing but looking very uncomfortable. 

Amazing skating gif!

Bullwinkle's Corner - the 1961 commercials

"It's not that I don't trust you, William Tell,
But first I have some Cheerios to sell!"

Some of the best commercials of the era. For certain, the best animated commercials. And for double-sure, the best Cheerios commercials.

Along with The Flintstones and Top Cat, Rocky and Bullwinkle was among that rare cartoon series which was shown in prime time. Along with the continuing adventures of "Moose and Squirrel" in Frostbite Falls, we had Peabody and Sherman, Fractured Fairy Tales and the inimitable Dudley Do-right. Attempts to turn these into live-action movies were a miserable failure. You had to be there. 

Meantime, here's an obvious animation mistake that reveals just how low-budget these things were in the '60s. It was the style then. Characters could appear and disappear, and either nobody noticed, or nobody cared.

The Breck Girl of the Horsy Set

Horse playing piano

Just because it's Tuesday.

Baby Goat Flood at Sunflower Farm

"O lost your mumbet": old people on Facebook

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Am I making fun of "old people" in posting these? I just think they're funny in a silly, whimsical way, hopefully not poking nasty fun at an age group we are ALL going to end up in (if we are so lucky). "O lost your mumbet" is classic, as are the bean comments and profile pictures which are wildly askew. I confess I flounder at the thought of technology and stick to the few vastly-outdated things (like this blog, which was once described as "embarrassing") that I know how to do. I am a desktop person in a Smartphone world. The rest of it, well, cream of corn suits me fine, babies hanging from sunflowers are adorable, and unpleasant granddaughters are a reality which, though I don't want to face it, is comforting to see identified as one of the nastier realities of grandparenthood.