Magic Gifs! Cats and stuff.

 

Watch a beaver eating cabbage!

It's the sound that's so relaxing. 

This is nothing short of a miracle!

 

I used to subscribe to this channel, then for some reason got away from it .Now I'm binge-watching all of them. Out of a single portait, this computer animation not only brings the 40-year-old Poe to eerie life, but extends his lifespan another 40 years to distinguished old age. And then, they make him a woman!

SON of MOTORMOUTH!

I have no words for this!

"Did you play any of these?" Bizarre games from back in the day

 

Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Clue. Some board games are classics and have been staples of family fun time for decades. Then there are those odd games where you simply crack open a bunch of nuts, or slowly murder a large mammal with gravity. We dug through some old Sears catalogs from the 1960s to remember the forgotten board games of the decade.

Did you play any of these?

LOVE

Twister is game already full of flirtation and suggestion, so it is suprising that a younger spin on the game blantantly called LOVE existed in the midcentury. "Use your hands and feet to spell L-O-V-E," the ad proclaimed. Our parents would have put the kibosh on this scenario immediately.

FEELEY MEELEY

Here is "the game that gives you a funny feeling." Players put their hands inside a box and fondle and plastic toy, trying to guess what it is. Once you've become familiar with the 23 little objects, the game was pretty much pointless. Of course, you could also just cut a hole in a shoebox and make your own.

GREEN GHOST

This glow-in-the-dark game looks pretty fun, with its little plastic snakes, bats, keys and spooky trees. Oh, and feathers! That being said, with all the tiny parts, there's no way kids weren't losing some pieces.

GRAB A LOOP

You wear a belt with rings attached to it. You run around. Your friends try to rip off the rings. Hours of fun!

BUCKET OF FUN

Bucket of Fun combines all the fun of cleaning up your toys with… well, that's it. Plastic balls erupt out of a plastic bucket. You gather them up. This is like selling a deck of cards just to play "52-card pick up."

BEE BOPPER

For a mind-numbingly simple game — you swat a bee — the description is rather long-winded: "Spin bee on spinning card. Watch closely where he stops. Spinner has 4 colors that correspond to Bee Launchers. If spinner stops on your color act quickly to get your bee up before he's caught on the launcher. If bee is caught before launch, catcher gets 2 points… after launch 1 point. Winner is the one with most points."

THE LAST STRAW

Hey, kids! Want to rupture the spine of an ungulate? Just overburden this poor Bactrian camel with wood and watch his back snap in two! Ha! Just because "the straw that broke the camel's back" is a common idiom, that doesn't mean it makes for a good game.

MR. SPIN-HEAD

Feed a clown marbles.

OH, NUTS!

Pick open a bunch of plastic walnuts, looking for marbles. At least with real nuts, you can eat them.

DON'T SPILL THE BEANS

More proof that all you needed to make a game in the 1960s was some plastic food and an idiom. Though, technically, isn't the goal of the game — dumping beans into a pot — "spilling the beans"?

SCARNEY

What more could children want than a cold, ultilitarian, multi-purpose game from "gambling expert" John Scarne. Okay, maybe on second thought we'll play with that plastic camel.

NBC-TV NEWS GAME WITH CHET HUNTLEY

Another thing kids love: the tragedy and politics of the evening news!

TALK TO CECIL

"Cecil is a hand puppet that really talks… He directs the game." Obey the dragon!

http://www.metv.com/lists/13-wacky-forgotten-board-games-from-the-1960s

Have Gun, Will Travel: Paladin's Seduction

 

I've been watching Have Gun all over again, and as usual, I am struck by how much it has changed. I have mixed feelings about Richard Boone, finding him both sexy and a little too craggy and world-weary to be truly appealing - oh, those long, long sighs that seem to indicate he's actually a little bored to be doing Season 7 of this thing - though he does have a diamond-sharp intelligence mixed with alpha-male swaggering that was, maybe, ahead of its time. He was something of an anti-hero, and an antidote to Chuck Connors, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, the other major players in this wildly-popular '60s genre. Have Gun was sometimes called the "thinking man's Western", and Paladin was surely a thinking man who sometimes thought with his pistol. Take that whatever way you wish.

This man wore ruffled shirts and paisley smoking jackets, murmured sweet somethings to the multiple fancy ladies in his hotel room in San Francisco, and then got called out to go and kill somebody. We knew it was coming when he flashed his card with the knight on it and we heard that unforgettable four-note theme that meant TROUBLE. BTW, I haven't confirmed this yet, but I have heard that it was written by the genius composer Bernard Hermann, who also scored Psycho, Taxi Driver and countless other classics.

In essence, that was the show. Ladies, card, travel, gun, oops, BANG, dead.  It was only a half-hour show, meaning the plot, characters and story arc had to all be accomplished in the space of 23 minutes. Sometimes I get lost in these intricacies which are introduced and developed so quickly that it can be hard to follow. Boone slows the pace down with his gravitas, his pacing lion's stride and centaur presence on a horse (though he DOES bounce a little too much, revealing that he's really a city slicker at heart). 

There's always a woman, often in some sort of dilemma, and always a longstanding grudge, sometimes a prisoner with his hands shackled together, a few tussles in which we obviously see Stunt Paladin at work, and then - always always - the gunfight. This is where the cobra strikes. And his fans all know that even if he has had to lay down his enormous horse pistol, he has another little gun secreted in the palm of his hand which, at close range, can blow a man down in a second. And then there's that thing he does with his hat, the quick jerk down over his eyes followed by a gentle pat on top. Aside from Humphrey Bogart, no man has ever worn a hat so well.

THIS particular scene is hotter than I expected. Paladin is getting over a fever and lying prone in the wagon - an erotic scenario to begin with - and this Mexican spitfire, whose husband is puttering around just outside the wagon, climbs in, climbs on and seduces him. He is more than willing to be seduced, and is that rare, rare thing - an actor who knows how to kiss convincingly. None of this Anthony Perkins flinching and wincing. He looks like he enjoyed doing this scene, and his little crooked smile at the end seems to say, "Ah. Another conquest." 

COME BACK, DYLAN THOMAS! All is forgiven.

 

Poem on his Birthday    

      In the mustardseed sun,
   By full tilt river and switchback sea
      Where the cormorants scud,
   In his house on stilts high among beaks
      And palavers of birds
   This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
      He celebrates and spurns
   His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
      Herons spire and spear.

  
      Under and round him go
   Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
      Doing what they are told,
   Curlews aloud in the congered waves
      Work at their ways to death,
   And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
      Who tolls his birthday bell,
   Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
      Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

      In the thistledown fall,
   He sings towards anguish; finches fly
      In the claw tracks of hawks
   On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
      Through wynds and shells of drowned
   Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
      In his slant, racking house
   And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
      Herons walk in their shroud,

      The livelong river's robe
   Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
      And far at sea he knows,
   Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
      Under a serpent cloud,
   Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
      The rippled seals streak down
   To kill and their own tide daubing blood
      Slides good in the sleek mouth.

      In a cavernous, swung
   Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
      Thirty-five bells sing struck
   On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
      Steered by the falling stars.
   And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
      Terror will rage apart
   Before chains break to a hammer flame
      And love unbolts the dark

      And freely he goes lost
   In the unknown, famous light of great
      And fabulous, dear God.
   Dark is a way and light is a place,
      Heaven that never was
   Nor will be ever is always true,
      And, in that brambled void,
   Plenty as blackberries in the woods
      The dead grow for His joy.

      There he might wander bare
   With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
      Or the stars' seashore dead,
   Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
      And wishbones of wild geese,
   With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
      And every soul His priest,
   Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
      Be at cloud quaking peace,

      But dark is a long way.
   He, on the earth of the night, alone
      With all the living, prays,
   Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
      The bones out of the hills,
   And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
      Rage shattered waters kick
   Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
      Faithlessly unto Him

      Who is the light of old
   And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
      As horses in the foam:
   Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
      And druid herons' vows
   The voyage to ruin I must run,
      Dawn ships clouted aground,
   Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
      Count my blessings aloud:

      Four elements and five
   Senses, and man a spirit in love
      Tangling through this spun slime
   To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
      And the lost, moonshine domes,
   And the sea that hides his secret selves
      Deep in its black, base bones,
   Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
      And this last blessing most,

      That the closer I move
   To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
      The louder the sun blooms
   And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
      And every wave of the way
   And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
      With more triumphant faith
   Than ever was since the world was said,
      Spins its morning of praise,

      I hear the bouncing hills
   Grow larked and greener at berry brown
      Fall and the dew larks sing
   Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
      More spanned with angels ride
   The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
      Holier then their eyes,
   And my shining men no more alone
      As I sail out to die

Don't stop smoking! SMOKE SPUDS!

Without a doubt, this is the most bizarre ad compilation I've ever seen. And I've seen some doozies! This is from the video description:
Have you ever heard of SPUD cigarettes? Why is their mascot a SNOWMAN? Why is that guy smoking Spuds in the shower? Why is that weirdo trying to hypnotize us? And what the futz is "mouth happy"? The answer to these and many other questions cannot be found in this bizarre ad compilation. And friends - DON'T STOP SMOKING! Switch to New Spuds! 

NEWS FLASH! There is a Wikipedia entry explaining Spud: "Menthol cigarettes were first developed by Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in 1924, though the idea did not become popular until the Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. acquired the patent in 1927, marketing them nationwide as "Spud Menthol Cooled Cigarettes". Spud brand menthol cigarettes went on to become the fifth most popular brand in the US by 1932, and it remained the only menthol cigarette on the market until the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company created the Kool brand in 1933." 

NOTE: This explains a LOT, from the bizarre name to the "cooler than KOOL" (i. e. far superior to that OTHER menthol cigarette). I believe this campaign was last-ditch, as the guy smoking in the shower says, "SAY! I used to smoke Spuds years ago, but they sure didn't taste like THIS!" This is an admission that they used to taste like crap. The reference to "new Spuds" is misleading, if the cigarette was first marketed in 1927! Makes you wonder how many times they "rebranded" these things to try to make them successful. The fact that nobody has ever heard of them is telling. These ads look like 1950s-'60s, especially that last, really creepy one, so "old Spuds" from the 1920s were probably pretty atrocious. But at least you can smoke them when you have a cold!)

CLASSIC! Perry Mason opening theme

 

I never watched this show, but the opening theme scared the hell out of me! I wasn't allowed to watch it because it was "too adult" (and, no doubt, too boring anyway). But from my bedroom, where I lay straining my ears while I was supposed to be asleep, I could hear the gaunt, stark opening trills on the strings, followed by the DUM! DUM! - then the dark, bluesy, film noir-sounding theme, like something from an old Warner Brothers movie with a score by Max Steiner. Max Steiner didn't write this, but he could have.

POP goes the COMMENTS SECTION!

 

Is BLOGGER dying? Who knows, at this point. For some reason, when I was having problems with Google, the page suddenly changed and many features were dropped, and I have not been able to get them back. My son the techie said Google probably isn't supporting Blogger any more BECAUSE IT'S SO OLD! I resented that, mainly because I too am "so old" and not technically proficient at all. 

At the moment, I can only use workarounds. The comments will no longer be visible under the posts, which INFURIATES me because I used to love the long threads of comments which were easy to see. Now you have to click on "comments" and a box comes up. Oh yes, you CAN see the comments, kind of, sort of, but it looks like shit. I don't know yet if I will get an email copy, so I may not even be able to monitor them. Worst of all, I can't edit or delete comments that may be dangerous to leave up. 

It takes something away from the blog that you can't just view the conversations, which sometimes have gone on for years and years. The rare posts that got over 100 comments now don't display them at all. It is all supposed to be there somewhere, but it won't show. A big chunk of Blogger has been cut off and thrown away. If Google does in fact bail on this, it will be the end of a 12-year experience - nay, an ODYSSEY taking me from the callow optimist of 2011 to the cynical, world-weary, but far more realistic person you see today.

SO, if you want to leave a comment and see all the pre-existing comments, click "comments" at the bottom of the post and a box will come up. I hope. I think you have to fill in some idiotic thing like "I am not a robot" (OH REALLY?? I was certain you were!). But for now, that's the best I can do, and the other features missing will have to be worked-around as well. So, beloved readers, hang in with me and I will try not to have a nervous breakdown over all this. Phoooey!

Why is Harry obsessed with SAUSAGES? (And I don't mean his wee-wee).

 

Could SAUSAGES be behind the royal rift? Diana's former butler Paul Burrell claims 'Harry felt less important than William as a child because he got fewer bangers with his breakfast' - and the rift between Fab Four widened over 'house envy'

• Princess Diana's butler says Harry would get upset as a child at breakfast times
• Paul Burrell says the Duke of Sussex wondered why William got more sausages
• He said the nanny would tell Harry that William needed more as he would be king

By Matthew Lodge For Mailonline

Published: 20:53 EST, 15 January 2023 | Updated: 21:39 EST, 15 January 2023

Princess Diana's former butler has pondered whether William being given more sausages for breakfast when he was a child played a part in their played a part in their fractious relationship as adults.

Paul Burrell claims the Duke of Sussex would become confused and complain when he was young that his older brother got bigger breakfasts.

The 64-year-old claims after the young prince asked why that once, a nanny for the pair told him the now-Prince of Wales needed 'filling up more' as he would be 'King one day'.

Mr Burrell, who acted as butler for the Princess of Wales for 10 years, said it could have been an early display of the dynamic between the two feuding siblings that dominates today.

Mr.  Burrell, who was present during William and Harry's childhood, said there were signs of an early rivalry between the princes.  

'When I look back now, I think maybe I was glimpsing the dynamic at play,' he told the Sun.

'One time I saw the nanny give William three sausages at breakfast and Harry had two.

'And Harry would look at his plate and say, how come he gets three? And I only get two.' 

Mr Burrell added that when the nanny responded about the pecking order between the two brothers the now-Duke of Sussex would 'fall quiet and suck it up'.

The former member of the Royal Household said despite Diana seeing the boys as 'absolutely equal', he believes the hierarchy within the Firm that puts William first has caused resentment from Harry.

He said that the Duke 'found it tough living up to the standard set by William' and that this became more stark when he attended Eton against his mother's wishes.

Mr Burrell said Diana had felt Harry would be unjustly compared to his older brother if he went to the independent school, and that this turned out to be the case. 

The father-of-two said that William was 'brighter' than his younger brother, and that while the future King was 'measured and stoic', Harry took to playing the clown to get noticed.

He added that he no longer recognises the Harry who is in the public eye today to the young boy he saw grow up in the Royal Household, saying: 'He's clearly hurt and angry at being "the spare" and so he's lashing out from that place.'

 Meanwhile, Mr Burrell claimed that the relationship between the Fab Four - the Sussexes and the Cambridges -  worsened over 'house envy'

He claimed that Meghan, who was then living in Nottingham Cottage while the Cambridges were in Kensington Palace, 'got a sight of everything Kate and William enjoyed... she realised she wasn't in the top tier'.

It comes after the Duke of Sussex lashed out at Mr Burrell in his recently released memoir, Spare, which also saw him launch vicious attacks on his brother and the monarchy.

In the book, which was released in the UK on Tuesday, Harry accused Diana's former butler of 'milking' her death for money by publishing his 2001 book A Royal Duty.

The novel contained a raft of private revelations, although in his memoir Harry called it 'one man's self-justifying, self-centring version of events'. 

Harry said he learned of the book while working as an unpaid farmhand in Australia at the age of 19, adding that it 'made my blood boil'.

He wrote that he wanted to fly home to 'confront' Mr Burrell for his 'cold and overt betrayal', but his father and brother talked him out of it.

Speaking last week after the publication of Harry's memoir, Mr Burrell said Diana would be 'appalled' by her youngest son's behaviour, and accused Harry of making 'personal, vindictive revelations'.

 He added that he saw Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, as the driving force behind the Duke's behaviour. 

He told Australian television: 'She [Meghan] is beside him steering him on his path. You can't just blame Harry. You have to blame the both of them. 

'I don't like to see the rug being pulled beneath the feet of our King and Harry's brother, who is on his way to being King. And the snipes that have gone forward about Kate [the Princess of Wales]...

'Kate has never put a foot wrong. But the other side of the story will never be heard because the royals believe there's great dignity in silence.'

Watch the birdie!

 

SURREAL: Fred and Eleanor in extreme slow-mo

 

Oh how I love making animations! This is a small excerpt from Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell's classic tap number, Begin the Beguine. Even at this slowed-down speed, their grace is incredible. The music syncs up better than I had hoped! 

Still working on blog problems. . . I hope someone can see this, at least. I can't be sure.

HIDE THE TV! Why people hid their TV sets in the '50s

 

I have always puzzled over why all the old advertisments for television sets showed people closing cabinet doors on them to hide the screen. It seemed unthinkable to allow that ever-open eye to sit there nakedly in your living room. But this reluctance to reveal that you even HAD a TV has another explanation. Just as you could see into the TV, as if all the actors and news people and kids' programs were taking place right inside the set, people back then believed that THE TV COULD SEE THEM. No, I'm not kidding! There was a widespread panic about this insidious development that would have made George Orwell order another pint of Guinness. You even saw newspaper editorials about this horrifying violation of privacy. But when the thing wasn't turned on, it had to be shuttered in, pushed down, HIDDEN. Some years later, TV consoles became more elaborate, and eventually the TV set was seen as just another highly-functional but not terribly decorative piece of furniture. 

P.S To my unending annoyance, I have not yet found out what's wrong with the disabled features on my blog. The comments section has been weirdly blanked out by Google, which is weird because I've never seen another reference to Google on this blog. My son the techie just claimed Google has given up on Blogger and no longer supports them, but why then am I still able to post? I have even done some copy-and-paste to republish old posts. Some things work, some don't. And I am not even sure how it started. DAMN, this is just like Real Life!

P. P. S.: Since I can no longer upload videos directly from YouTube, they now look pretty shitty, but I would recommend you click on "Watch on YouTube" at the bottom. No black bars there.

Let it steep a while! Edward G. Robinson for Maxwell House coffee

This is one of those great old ads I remember from my childhood. I wasn't old enough to remember Edward G's gangsterish heyday in the '30s and '40s, so by the time this ad came out, he was a retired gentleman with an aristocratic, if Bronx-ish manner of speaking. For some reason the part I remember most is "let it steep a while to develop the full flavor" - not knowing what "steep" meant, of course, and even at that age wondering why he was using INSTANT Maxwell House to "brew" a pot of coffee. Of course, no one makes a pot of coffee out of instant any more, just as no one "percs" their coffee - which is too bad, because the wood-block theme for the Maxwell House coffee percolator was a classic. And it did smell good, though tasting it was another matter. Anyway, I have a poignant memory of Robinson's very last movie role, performed while he was frail and terminally ill with cancer. Soylent Green is one of my favorite dystopian movies, in no small measure because of the rapport between Charlton Heston and Robinson. He was also in a bizarre but moving death scenario where his body was soon to be transformed into FOOD. "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!" Heston cried, almost as memorably as "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"

We're all in Crimbo Limbo. . .

 

It's that time of year again - or rather, that weird non-time between Christmas and New Years. Myself, I am glued to my chair, when not eating macadamia nuts and Purdy's chocolates and feeling sick.

It is raining too hard to go outside. It is raining too hard to do anything.

I had never even heard of Crimbo (some sort of weird contraction of Christmas, probably British or maybe even Australian) until a few years ago when I stumbled across it on some site or other. Crimbo is also related to Crimbo pressie, Crimbot, Crimbus, Crimcheck, and no doubt thousands of others, many of them defined below. Some of them are nasty. Looking them up will give you something to do.

TOP DEFINITION

Crimbo Limbo

The period after Christmas Day and before New Year's Eve, mainly spent sitting down and eating leftovers. Many find it extremely dull.

I'm so bored. It feels like crimbo limbo's been going on forever...

ALTERNATE DEFINITION

Crimbo Limbo 

Crimbo Limbo is the time in-between Christmas Day and New Years Day, where you feel fulfilled, eat lots, and give yourself alcohol poisoning.

Ryan: Dude, I haven't done anything productive in three whole days, yet I still feel great!
Lewis: Well, that's Crimbo Limbo for ya!

RELATED TERMS (in alphabetical order)

Crimbo Limbo
crimbo pressie
Crimbo (short for Crimbabwe) 

also known as the Heart of Darkness
crimbot
Crimbus
Crimcheck
Crim Cram
Crimdalf
crim de la crim
crim della crim
Crimder
Crime
crimea
Crime-A-Dozen
Crime against Humanities
Crime against nature
crime-a-lator
Crime-Alert
Crime and Punishment
crimeaversary
Crime Bluff
Crimebo
Crimeboss
crimebridge
crimecation
Crime Community
crimed
Crimedale
Crime Dawg
Crime Deturent
Crimedicts
crime dog
Crimedotte
Crime-dotte County
Crimee
crime essam

It's also a game.

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. Still haven't solved the bizarre problems I am having with Blogger. Some of the features of my blog have been mysteriously disabled (most significantly, the comments section, though posting videos is now quite difficult and doesn't look right). This seemed to happen when I briefly could not go on my Google account, but once that problem was solved, the blog deficiencies remained. My son the techie genius said "Blogger must be broken. Maybe they'll fix it. I'm amazed Google still supports something this old." But hell, I'M old myself - the blog celebrates obsolete technology, among other things, so I don't have any desire to render it slickly updated. No bells and whistles, which I loathe on any website.  So I'll keep working on this, trying to get answers. My Amazon Author Page is now nearly disabled, through no fault of my own, so anyone  following the link I generally post will see something pretty amateurish and pathetic. I was so proud of that page, encompassing my author profile, my blog posts, and a photo gallery which included images of the covers of my books (kind of important for recognition!). Amazon has dropped all these features without explaining it. So there's not much left but bare bones. I may have to set something up myself, but I'm still wondering why they would do this. It won't sell any books for THEM if they put up shitty webpages for authors that do more harm than good. But anyway, have a happy new year! May 2023 be COVID FREE.

Isaac Asimov falls asleep during interview

One of the greatest science fiction writers of all time falls asleep during an interview.

Victorian Chrismas Cats: to bring you cheer!

 TO BRING YOU CHEER. . . 

. . . THIS TIME OF YEAR!