Catholics, go home!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs6qZd_xP1w

Oh. . . KAY. From the beginning, I've had problems with this ad campaign, and I have even more problems with it now.


Around Christmas time, the TV ad posted on YouTube (above) and a few similar ones began to run on CTV during the news hour. In fact, you might call it saturation advertising. The ad was obviously very professional, not some slap-up job recorded with Sister Mary Margaret's Smartphone.  (Blogger's note: I can't post YouTube videos any more, no doubt part of Blogger's sinister plot to suck all the joy out of this experience. Try the link above and see if it works - pray, please - or enter Catholics Come Home on YouTube.)


I guess everyone in these parts assumed Catholics Come Home was Vancouver-based, and that these ads were freshly-made and tailored for our local "market". It was a unique and even impressive form of evangelism that didn't pretend to promote Catholicism as some fun, up-to-date and hip experience where everyone claps and dances along with the hymns.


No magic squirrels, either! The E-Z Answer Squirrel on the United Church Wondercafe web site (a site so fearful and dishonest that "United" and "Church" don't even appear on it anywhere) put the kibosh on my own already-disillusioned connection to organized religion. In particular, I had grown sick of a shallow "faith" that strains to be hip while still singing 200-year-old old John Wesley hymns on Sunday morning.



It seemed to me that these Evangomercials, slick as they were, at least presented the Catholic Church as a religion, not some shallow gathering of people drawn by the fact that "anything goes" and sin does not really exist. I began to admire them for their honest portrayal of religion as religion.


Then I saw the date on this particular Evangomercial as it appears on YouTube, the same one I have seen during local TV news in the past few months.


It was made in 2008.

It was also made in the States, so it must've been sold to somebody in Canada. In other words, this ad and all the ads like it are a commodity, probably a package deal, with each ad dealing with a separate issue (loneliness, guilt, disillusionment with the Church, etc.)


2008! These Evangomercials (their word) aren't new, folks. They're so old you could blow the dust off them. Moreover, visiting Catholicscomehome.org is a pretty hair-raising experience.


The home page depicts three church doors, the kind with the pointy top, and each one bears a category: I'm Not Catholic; I'm Not Currently Attending Mass; I'm Proud to be Catholic. Each heading links to mountains of material, and when you actually begin to explore it all, the sheer weight and heft of it is overwhelming and kind of suffocating. Here is just one tiny snippet aimed at these foolish folk who still doubt the existence of God:

Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God

More Featured Writing


The Argument from Change
The Argument from Efficient Causality
The Argument from Time and Contingency
The Argument from Degrees of Perfection
The Design Argument
The Kalam Argument
The Argument from Contingency
The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole
The Argument from Miracles
The Argument from Consciousness
The Argument from Truth
The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God
The Ontological Argument
The Moral Argument
The Argument from Conscience
The Argument from Desire
The Argument from Aesthetic Experience
The Argument from Religious Experience
The Common Consent Argument
Pascal's Wager

In this section you will find arguments of many different kinds for the existence of God. And we make to you, the reader, an initial appeal. We realize that many people, both believers and nonbelievers, doubt that God's existence can be demonstrated or even argued about. You may be one of them. You may in fact have a fairly settled view that it cannot be argued about. But no one can reasonably doubt that attention to these arguments has its place in any book on apologetics. For very many have believed that such arguments are possible, and that some of them actually work. They have also believed that an effective rational argument for God's existence is an important first step in opening the mind to the possibility of faith—in clearing some of the roadblocks and rubble that prevent people from taking the idea of divine revelation seriously. And in this they have a real point. Suppose our best and most honest reflection on the nature of things led us to see the material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused; to see its form as the result of random motions, devoid of any plan or purpose. Would you then be impressed by reading in an ancient book that there exists a God of love, or that the heavens proclaim his glory? Would you be disposed to take that message seriously? More likely you would excuse yourself from taking seriously anything claimed as a communication from the Creator. As one person put it: I cannot believe that we are children of God, because I cannot believe there is anyone to do the adopting. It is this sort of cramped and constricted horizon that the proofs presented in this chapter are trying to expand. They are attempts to confront us with the radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited, and to open minds to a level of being beyond it. If they succeed in this—and we can say from experience that some of the proofs do succeed with many people—they can be of very great value indeed. You may not feel that they are particularly valuable to you. You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God's presence; and that is something for which to be profoundly grateful. But that does not mean you have no obligation to ponder these arguments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they really need. You may even be asked to provide help.

I will admit, I never made it to Pascal's Wager.


Much as I think these ads are professional-looking and even brave, they are the shiny surface which overlays a heavy, inflexible, centuries-old doctrine. The ads emphasize acceptance, unconditional love, and redemption of sin through Jesus: in fact, one ad portrays a flashback of a man verbally abusing a woman, with the man sitting there sweating and writhing in remorse. The answer? God, of course. But not just any God.


I can't really blame a denomination for trying to get followers back. The hemorrhage of churchgoers everywhere (except in radical fundamentalist congregations) is steady and inexorable. As far as I'm concerned, nothing can stop it. In the case of Catholicism, their unbending rules on homosexuality, abortion, celibacy of clergy, refusal to admit women as leaders, divorce, and even marital sex (only for procreation, folks!) are slowly rendering them less and less relevant. Society is leaving them behind, whether for good or ill (and believe me, there are times when I think it's for ill).

Bill Maher once presented a scathing satire of a Catholics Come Home Evangomercial in which charts and statistics appear on the screen, accompanied by a voiceover assuring parents that it was now statistically less likely that a priest would molest their children. "Come on back, folks!" Maher definitely has a point: festering scandals and horrific, inexcusable coverups are never addressed in any of this organization's material. Elsewhere in the church I have heard such rationalizations as "most priests are wonderful people" and "scandals appear in other places, too". Such cowardice and moral obfuscation masquerading as God's grace is abhorrent beyond measure.


But that's not all that bothers me here. I am sure that most Canadians believe these ads were made exclusively for Canadian television, by Canadian Catholics. But the truth is, they were produced by a vastly-different culture and are more than five years out of date, a huge span of time in a world that moves in an ever-accelerating blur. I just had to find the real source of this Evangomercial campaign, and it took some hunting. Then I found information on a seminar featuring the Rock on which Catholicscomehome.org built its Church.


Tom Peterson – Catholics Come Home


Click here to register for this event Thursday, December 13, 2012

6:30 am – 8:30 am

Join us for our monthly breakfast. This is an opportunity to start the day with Mass, an inspirational speaker, and the opportunity to connect with other Catholic business people. You will leave inspired ad better prepared to be a Catholic leader.

Mr. Peterson has over 25 years of experience as an award-winning and record-setting national corporate advertising executive and entrepreneur. His prior marketing, advertising, and management experience includes: American Hospital Supply Corporation; Thomas Publishing Co., IDX Systems Corporation, Phoenix Medical Management, Peterson Sparks, Inc., and Peterson Advertising Corporation.


While on a Catholic retreat in 1997, Mr. Peterson had a profound reversion experience in his Catholic faith. Soon afterward, he received a vocational calling, and eventually founded Catholics Come Home, Inc. and VirtueMedia, Inc., educational not-for-profit apostolates, dedicated to promoting Catholic evangelization and the sanctity of human life.



Ohhhhh. . . kay, again. So this entire movement was founded, not by a priest or a nun or by anyone directly linked to the organization of the Church. I think Mr. Peterson saw a marketing opportunity after his "reversion" experience (and somehow, the word "reversion" doesn't carry very good associations for me). He has been at it for years, supervising these ads and, presumably, setting up a web site so thick with dogma that it's hard to get through even one article.


This is the state of religion in 2013. It's a business, and it must be run like one. The purpose of a business, as we all know, is to make money. The Church can't function without it. So here's the plan: draw them back into the fold with moving images of love, acceptance, redemption and good works, then if they have any doubts, hit them with Pascal's Wager. Meantime, all those little issues like abortion and gay rights and child sexual abuse are conveniently stashed: just get asses in seats again, and maybe this listing old dowager of a ship might not sink after all.

Fifty Shades of Masturbation

 

I've tried to ignore it up to now. God, how I have tried! But because I'm interested in literary trends, I couldn't help but notice something:  in all those year-end summaries for 2012, just one book (or series of books) was at the very top of the list.

I don't think I need to tell you which one it was: Fifty Shades of Grey, a sort of Dairy Queen soft-serve of female pornography. Its wild success has left publishers everywhere feeding all their well-written novels into the shredder and beating the bushes for women who can't write, but CAN fuck, or at least fuck their female readers' minds.

There was so much written about this remarkable phenomenon (warmly applauded by publishers on the verge of bankruptcy) that I decided to narrow my search and just read religious views. I thought they might be more entertaining. Then I was so overwhelmed by all that stuff that I narrowed it down even more, restricting myself (with a taut silken tie) to Catholic views.

 

 

 

I don't know about you, but it makes me squirm just to think of Catholics having sex (though they do have lots of children, don't they?). It makes me squirm even more, as if my hands were wrenched behind my back with cold, hard handcuffs, to think of the Pope writing about simultaneous orgasm (if such a thing even exists). I found this juicy tidbit on a site called The Catholic Realist. This is from the comments section:

I’m not judging the book or you but I have one question, Is there a better book you could have read, a book with Christian values, instead of the 50 shades of grey book?

What a great question! If there is, I don’t know of one…and that’s a problem. The Catholic Church has some amazing books written about holy, married, sex, but most of them are written in a way that’s inaccesible for the average person. Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility gets pretty specific in talking about what an ideal sexual encounter between a married couple looks like – including suggestions on using foreplay to build up to the woman’s climax so that both spouses can ideally orgasm together. But as much as I love JPII, his book is not an easy read – it’s not super accessible.

We also have Christopher West’s The Good News about Sex and Marriage. West also gets pretty explicit – he talks openly and honestly about all kinds of questions married couples would have including things about oral sex, anal sex, sex toys, and orgasms. While his book is an easier read than Love and Responsibility, it reads more as a Catechism than something designed to enhance holy married sex.
 

 

Hmmmmm. I didn't realize there WAS a Catechism (and I confess as a Protestant I'm not even sure what that is) for oral and anal sex, not to mention vibrators and "dills". I wonder if West writes about them in the sense of  "thou shalt not try this, thou shalt not lubricate that, thou shalt not put batteries in that thing over there," etc. From what I have heard, the Catholic church only sanctions conventional marital sex in the missionary position, and only if the couple desires to conceive a child. Anything else is sinful and forbidden.

But still, having someone tell me not to do something is pretty arousing in itself. I haven't read these religious sex how-tos any more than I've read the Fifty Shades trilogy (which is supposed to be one of the biggest buckets of swill in literary history), but only because I couldn't get through them without going into cardiac arrest.
 

 

This passage also interested me. It's a sort of inventory of cliches that keep repeating in Fifty Shades:

According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites

 

her lip 35 times, Christian’s lips “quirk up” 16 times, Christian “cocks his head to one

 

 side” 17 times, characters “purse” their lips 15 times, and characters raise their

 

 eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana’s anthropomorphic

 

 “subconscious” (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58

 

 references to Ana’s “inner goddess,” and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of

 

“oh crap” (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to

 

 “holy crap,” “double crap,” or the ultimate “triple crap”).

 

…Ana says “Jeez” 81 times and “oh my” 72 times. She “blushes” or “flushes”

 

 125 times, including 13 that are “scarlet,” 6 that are “crimson,” and one that is

 

"stars and stripes red.” (I can’t even imagine.) Ana “peeks up” at Christian 13 times,

 

 and there are 9 references to Christian’s “hooded eyes,” 7 to his “long index finger,”

 

 and 25 to how “hot” he is (including four recurrences of the epic declarative sentence

 

 “He’s so freaking hot.”). Christian’s “mouth presses into a hard line” 10 times.

 

 

 

Characters “murmur” 199 times, “mutter” 49 times, and “whisper” 195 times

 

(doesn’t anyone just talk?), “clamber” on/in/out of things 21 times, and “smirk” 34

 

times. Christian and Ana also “gasp” 46 times and experience 18 “breath hitches,”

 

suggesting a need for prompt intervention by paramedics. Finally, in a remarkable bit

 

of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 “grins” and 124 “frowns”… which,

 

 by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences “intense,”

 

 “body-shattering,” “delicious,” “violent,” “all-consuming,” “turbulent,”

 

“agonizing” and “exhausting” orgasms on just about every page.

 

Hmmmm.

Literary types such as myself protest this series of books mainly because they are so badly-written: pure tripe with a side order of smut. Religious people are uncomfortable with the very idea of  erotica and porn (and they may have a point: it can and does take the place of "real" sex in many marriages), and believe it's sinful for a wife to be aroused by anything except the holy touch of her husband.

I have another theory! Here it comes - it's evil, wicked and sinful.

These are masturbation books.

These are books that make women (especially middle-aged women who are frustrated and perhaps inorgasmic) begin to experiment with self-pleasure, something they may have avoided because our culture still thinks that female sexuality is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and never a force for good.

 

We're not supposed to touch ourselves "down there", are we? It feels too good, and besides, it does not serve the needs of our Master (not God, but our potbellied, stubbly, burping, useless husband). And God might not like it either, though up to now he's never really said anything about it.

Do you remember masturbation coming up in the Bible? Only that Onan guy, and we're not quite sure what happened there. But the problem with female masturbation is obvious, isn't it?

It's not goal-directed. It does not serve the marriage or serve the Lord. It does not help us conceive yet another baby.  All it does is give us pleasure, and for God's sake what makes you think THAT is OK?

But consider this.

 

There is an organ of the human body (ONLY of the female body) which has no other purpose whatsoever than to give pleasure. So much pleasure that, indeed, it can and does trigger orgasm. Furthermore, religious teaching tells us never to touch this organ. Only our husbands may touch it, but for the most part they don't because they don't know where it is or, in some cases, that it even exists.

So we carry this thing around, dormant. Then along comes this hot book, a lowest-common-denominator kind of thing that the most meagre IQ could understand, and all of a sudden women are starting to get ideas.

They're starting to get ideas about pleasure.

About female pleasure, and about how they've pretty much missed out on it because they are waiting for their stupid-ass husbands to figure out where their clitoris is.

But maybe one day they realize that this whole thing can be a do-it-yourself job. And THAT is the day of sin and God's retribution, of thunder and flame descending to envelop the world!

But, curiously, it doesn't happen. The worst that happens is one of those mind-blowing orgasms that show up in the book 14 million times. Will Mr. Stupid-ass Husband ever catch on? No, he's too busy looking at porn on his iPad and whacking off.

There's this impossible sexual ideal around, and it would be great if it ever happened, that a couple can feel intense passion for each other for 50 years and always experience simultaneous orgasm with no prior stimulation at all. After all, it only takes him 15 seconds. So what's HER problem?

In the middle of this erotic wasteland, Fifty Shades comes along and gives women an excuse (at least for a while - eventually it will go away again) to feel some real sexual pleasure, perhaps for the first time. Women had better get their hands on this book, and the vibrator that should be attached to it, before it's too late and the Pope has the lot of them rounded up and burned.

The last-chance lizard

 

 

 I was going to put a cute poem here, then felt sick and couldn't do it. This lame-o idea was forced upon me by the fact that I am STILL using the "workaround" that Google tells me I must use to put up photos. In other words, my blog STILL isn't fixed.

 

 

 

But I have to admit, I WANT a stuffy of the Geico Gecko. I love the Geico Gecko. Though it's only Tuesday, I think, I've found out a few things about the Geicko Gecko, most of which I won't tell you cuz they're boring and you don't need to kow.

 

 

  

 

 

Lies abound when it comes to the Geico Gecko. Some say he represents the Great God Geico, that, you know, mythical creature. Some say he merely represents geckos. This is a Madagascar Day Gecko eating its own young, or else tenderly carrying across the Gobi Desert or wherever they go.

 

 

 

 

 

These compact and brightly-colored reptiles serve as tender morsels to reward your pampered cat for doing absolutely nothing.  Better than those catnip-scented sachets.

 

 

 

 

 

The first Voice of the Gecko was Kelsey Grammer, a reptile if ever I saw one, but ***I*** don't remember hearing the Geico Gecko talk like that, do you?

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway. This whole lame-o post, which I now realize is nevertheless just a little cute anyway, is an experiment in using "workarounds" while the idiots at Google don't work on solving my photo-posting problem on Blogger. They don't work on it because it is bottom priority, if a priority at all.

 

My prediction? It won't ever be solved. So there you go.

 

Workarounds.

 

 

 

 

 

Do you like my (orange-u-) tan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE2m355-JRo


As you know, this blog is all about classic television and its impact on our daily lives as we hurtle towards self-annihilation. This clip summed up much of my belief about the desperate future of our race. Dismayed though I was by the end-times ennui inherent in this little song, I was heartened to note that Dr. Whatsisname's satin smoking jacket exactly matched his bronzed orange face. A fine example of accessorizing. Along with extreme comb-overs and vacuum-driven dick pumps, this brought to mind the 5,926 ads for  testosterone goo and folding canes (not to mention ambulance-chasing scuzzbag lawyers) that I had to sit through while trying to watch Fargo tonight on AMC. AMC must be watched by litigious geriatrics with limp pricks.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. If the above YouTube video doesn't work, try the link in red. But don't expect too much.  For the past couple of weeks I have been completely unable to post images on Blogger. The Browse button has been permanently disabled, forcing us to use all sorts of complicated arabesques as a substitute. Posting takes at least twice as long and is no longer fun, which seems to be the aim of the Blogger support team (a fine group of stoners if ever there was one). For a while I traded horror stories with other users on a message board, then realized it had been closed down. Instead I was greeted with this cheery message:

The immediately previous topic, which linked you to this advice, is closed. You can't help yourself, or other bloggers, by trying to answer there - or here!!!!!!!
If you need help, or if you want to provide help, please return to the topic which linked you to the previous topic. Don't waste time and effort trying to reply to closed topics / FAQs. The immediately previous topic, which linked here, is informational only - and further input there isn't helpful.

The multiple exclamation marks represent shouting, or at least petulance at being bothered by idiots who use Blogger and dare to ask for help. If they want to tell us something, fine - but they should do it respectfully, not with nasty little jabs like this. It's designed to make you slink away, ashamed of yourself for not knowing how to fix this fuckup yourself. Technology is evil.

Elephant Eternity (and other elephant poems)

Elephant Eternity


Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees

Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees

Elephants elephants walking like time


Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river

Fountaining their children in the mothery river

 Elephants elephants bathing like happiness


Strong and gentle elephants

Standing on the earth

Strong and gentle elephants

Like peace


Time is walking under elephant trees

 Happiness is bathing in the elephant river

 Strong gentle peace is shining

 All over the elephant earth


Adrian Mitchell

 

Ghost Elephants
In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants with your cargo of summer leaves at night I heard you breathing at the window Don't you ever think I'm not crying since you're away from me Don't ever think I went free At first the goodbye had a lilt to it— maybe just a couple of months— but it was a beheading. Ghost elephant, reach down, cross me over Jean Valentine        The Elephant is slow to mate The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste they wait for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd, and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word. So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. D. H. Lawrence

Elephant soccer (just a little bored)

Basically, this is an experiment. This is an experiment to see. This is an experiment to see if. This is an experiment to see if I.


Oh fuck, I'm trying to get my photos back somehow. The good people at Google have decided to disable my Insert Image button, seemingly forever. Or should I say the browse button, so we can't browse any more.  We can add photos through our phone though. Great.






Now they say we are supposed to use a feature named HTML which has caused me no end of frustration and grief by turning my nice photos into blocks of complicated code. When they come back to life as pictures, they are all screwed up. I can't even get them to come apart.

 SO, I have DRAWN these pictures on my blog and they were so real-looking, by yiminy, they CAME TO LIFE,  just like that!

Basically this is an experiment to see if I can live one more day without my blog, or at least the capacity to put together a post in my usual dishonest way.  As it is, it seems to take hours and involves lots of moving the pieces around and copying and pasting, which I hate.

Elephants versus other living things. The huge elephant running away from the little whatever-it-is, fox or something, reminds me of the classic gif of the black bear running away from the cat. The splashy one is a real Marlin Perkins special, a crocodile or alligator (or crocigator or allodile) splooshing up out of the water making them all go ouch.

I refused to post a really mean gif of a mother elephant kicking her baby so hard, it flew farther than any soccer ball in the field. I am not sure why this happened, but I suspect it wasn't the mother elephant. The baby was far too young to be weaned. Probably some rogue male who was just in a bad mood because his Insert Images button was disabled and he couldn't browse any more.

"Hockey is back"? Give me a break!

Sports Now

SPORTS NEWS FROM LOS ANGELES AND BEYOND

NHL, union reach tentative agreement

A marathon negotiating session produces a deal that will end the 113-day-old lockout.

 

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, right, and deputy commissioner Bill Daly speak to reporters in New York last month. (Mary Altaffer / AP Photo / January 6, 2013)

 

From the Associated Press

January 6, 2013, 9:12 a.m.

NEW YORK—

Hockey is back, and it took nearly four months and one long night to get the game back on the ice.

With the season on the line, the NHL and the players' association agreed on a tentative pact to end a 113-day lockout and save what was left of a fractured schedule.

Commissioner Gary Bettman and union executive director Donald Fehr ceased being adversaries and announced the deal while standing side by side near a wall toward the back of the negotiating room and showing a tinge of weariness.

"I want to thank Don Fehr," Bettman said. "We went through a tough period, but it's good to be at this point."

A marathon negotiating session that lasted more than 16 hours, stretching from Saturday afternoon until just before dawn Sunday, produced a 10-year deal.

"We've got to dot a lot of Is and cross a lot of Ts," Bettman said. "There's still a lot of work to be done, but the basic details of the agreement have been agreed upon."

Even players who turned into negotiators showed the strain of the long, difficult process.

"It was a battle," said Winnipeg Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey, a key member of the union's bargaining team. "Gary said a month ago it was a tough negotiation. That's what it was.

"Players obviously would rather not have been here, but our focus now is to give the fans whatever it is — 48 games, 50 games — the most exciting season we can. The mood has been nervous for a while. You want to be playing. You want to be done with this."

The collective bargaining agreement must be ratified by a majority of the league's 30 owners and the union's membership of approximately 740 players.

"Hopefully within a very few days the fans can get back to watching people who are skating, not the two of us," Fehr said.

All schedule issues, including the length of the season, still need to be worked out. The NHL has models for 50- and 48-game seasons.

The original estimate was regular-season games could begin about eight days after a deal was reached. It is believed that all games will be played within the two respective conferences, but that also hasn't been decided.

The players have been locked out since Sept. 16, the day after the previous agreement expired. That deal came after an extended lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season.

"Any process like this is difficult. It can be long," Fehr said.

Time was clearly a factor, with the sides facing a deadline of Thursday or Friday to reach a deal that would allow for a 48-game season to start a week later. Bettman had said the league could not allow a season of fewer than 48 games per team.

All games through Jan. 14, along with the All-Star game and the New Year's Day Winter Classic had already been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.

Without an agreement, the NHL faced the embarrassment of losing two seasons due to a labor dispute, something that has never happened in another North American sports league. The 2004-05 season was lost while the sides negotiated hockey's first salary cap.

Under the new CBA, free-agent contracts will have a maximum length of seven years, but clubs can go to eight years to re-sign their own players. Each side can opt out of the deal after eight years.

 

(Emphasis mine.)

 

Do you really think I believe all this shit? WHY do they announce the end of this dragged-out debacle to the public over and over again, only to suck it back and cause even more heartbreak?

 

Those who follow this blog (all two of you) will be aware, maybe, that I'm not much of a sports fan. But I have a compelling reason to hope the above hot air is really true: my son-in-law Jeff Paterson is a sportscaster who relies on hockey for the lion's share of his work.


 

In other words, it matters.

 

But we've been here before. I remember sitting there drinking my post-dinner coffee while the good people at CTV told me the lockout had ended. No, they didn't quite say that. They said that it LOOKED LIKE the lockout COULD end soon, "good news for hockey fans everywhere!" There is a reason I'm such a pessimist, and a reason why I have a dread of chicken-counting. It almost never works out. The media sieze on something half-baked, and then the announcement explodes upon the public that this whole mess has been solved. Hurray! Make way for the Second Coming!

 

I won't even get into the unforgiveable fracas generated by this unnecessary and protracted wrangle. I'm just sick of chirpy little announcements that "Hockey is Back!", when there is still such a hair-raising amount of work that needs to be done before any of this is really settled.

 

 

All it will take is the flick of one domino, and there are plenty of them still standing but quivering and ready to tumble.

 

(I'm not in the best mood now because I have come to the conclusion I can't use Internet Explorer any more if I am to post photos here. I am going to give it a few more days - why, I don't know, because no one at Google seems to give a royal shit about a few peons like us. I've had luck with Firefox before in untangling problems with my Google author's profile (in which I could not post photos at all - they were sort of glued together). I just tried to go on that page and it seems to be having a nervous breakdown, flickering rapidly back and forth between two BLANK screens, as if it had lost all my information. In the meantime I've found a very limited, laborious way to put up images here, but it's a total pain in the ass: you can't change the size of photos, and line-spacing needs constant correction, if you can do it at all.)
 

 

 

 

God, guys, don't DO this to us! This family has more invested in
hockey than most. My husband, a worse pessimist even than me, came up the stairs this morning telling me, "It looks like Jeff will be going back to work," and my first word was, "Really?" Then I saw that awful, awful word "tentative" and read down further into the article and realized we're probably doomed.

 

Hey, surprise me! Go ahead, I'd like it. But there are still way too many hoops to jump through, and at any point the whole thing could come crashing down. So why announce to the public that it's all sorted out?

 

Well, that ISN'T what they said. They said "tentative", but the public won't see that. Dazed by "Smart"-phones and other brain-replacing devices, they are devoid of any form of discernment and gulp down news headlines like so many lattes, conveniently ignoring little meaningless words like "tentative".

 

TENTATIVE MEANS IT'S NOT SOLVED. Wake up, assholes! NOTHING is solved until every party involved with this mess has signed on the dotted line. Do you know what that's called? It's called a legally binding agreement, a CONTRACT! Would you go around telling everyone you're married, that you have contract work, that you - never mind.

Maybe you would.

 

ten·ta·tive

/ˈtentətiv/

Adjective   Not certain or fixed; provisional: "a tentative conclusion". Done without confidence; hesitant: "tentative steps".

Synonyms experimental - provisional - trial - probationary

Rare George Reeves Audition Tape The Adventures of Superman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn9ZMbSjmVY&feature=player_embedded

I don't know what it is, but I like it

 

Finally this posted.  Nothing else.

But do we need anything else?




 

Failure quotes from the Bad Fairy

Note. A Bad Fairy (who isn't even gay) has forbidden me to post images. I just can't do it unless they're out of my phone. I don't even have a phone. My phone is like the ones you see on Sex and the City. I once took a picture of myself by accident and then discovered pictures of my cat, by accident. My cat is dead. I can't do photos any more? All I can do is this lame colored text. This file that I dredged up today while looking for something else (that I never found) kind of says it all.

Failure Quotes and Sayings

FAILUREisonly atemporary chantionetoustraightoryournextsuccessOnly thosewho dareto fail greatly caneverachieve greatlyur busineinlife is nottosucceed, but toontinue tofail ingoodpirits.If thereexists nopossibility offailure, hen victory is meaningless ailuri aman hasblunderedbut is notcapable fcashingin on the experience.Remember, noman is afailure who has friends.One mustbegod to be abl to tell uccessesrom failureswithout makingamistakeExperience is simplythenamewegive ur mistakes.Success isgoing from failure to failurewithout losingnthusiasmThe only real failure in life is the failureto tryThere ar noecrets to succes resultof preparation hard workand learningrom failureLife’seal faile is whenou donotrealize how close yowere tsuccesswhen you gave up.Success builds character, failure reveals iThere are no ailures just experiences and your reactions to themFailure is the tuition you pay for successA man may allmany times, but he won’t be a failure until he says that someonpushedhim.Failure is notfalling down but refusing to get upYou cannot do wrong without suffering wronHe who failto plan, plans to fail.Defeat is not theworst of failures. Not to have tried is the truefailure.Notice thedifference betweenwhhappens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failureI have not failed. I’ve just found 10ways thatwon’t workNeveconfuse a single defeat withainal defeat.

Just for a balance and a check, below are a few synonyms for failure. I mean, just a handful. There are hundreds, and none of them are good. Somehow these seem to fly in the face of all the sappy inspirational quotes I've been finding on the net, i.e. make sure you fail all the time cuzzadafact that the sun will shine on you tomorrow! and stuff like that. Or even the ubiquitous "there is no failure".

I wonder if heart surgeons abide by that one.

Truth is, failure is anathema in our culture. It IS seen as a disgrace and can often lead to dismissal from a job without any explanation, or just being passed over again and again. I keep hearing how rotten the workplace is now and how one slip-up, one small error can destroy a career that took years to build. So I wonder why we do all this pep-talking stuff about how useful and valuable failure is, and how you're not supposed to feel bad about it. People like Oprah and Edison and Bill Gates especially yammer on and on about failure. Poor things! I'll bet they suffered plenty of wreckage as they stumbled and flailed their way to legendary, worldwide success.

Main Entry:	failure [feyl-yer] Show IPA/ˈfeɪl yər/ Show Spelled
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	lack of success
Synonyms:	abortion, bankruptcy, bomb, botch, breakdown, bungle, bust, checkmate, collapse, decay, decline, defeat, deficiency, deficit, deterioration, downfall, failing, false step, faux pas, fiasco, flash in the pan, flop, frustration, implosion, inadequacy, lead balloon, lemon, loser, loss, mess, misadventure, miscarriage, misstep, nonperformance, nonsuccess, overthrow, rout, rupture, sinking ship, stalemate, stoppage, total loss, turkey, washout, wreck

Skate! Skate! Skate!

 

 

 

 

 

GIF me some more!

 

 

Making gifs is like magic to me. I used to think they were WAY hard to make, that I'd have to have some sort of Frankensteinian lab or a degree in computerivity, but now I realize they are idiot simple. Just go on Gifninja and enter your file numbers.  I don't have too many videos that are short enough however, so most of them are pictures flashing back and forth. This is a work in progress.

 

 

These images are from an old Polaroid ad for the Swinger camera, featuring a very young Ali McGraw. Somewhat altered. "Hey, meet the Swinger, Polaroid Swinger" (it's more than a camera, it's almost alive, it's only nineteen dollars and ninety-five)

 

 

 

The fine line, erased. Oscar Levant has haunted my consciousness for far longer than I ever wanted. Out, out, damned spot.

 

 

There are certain problems with speed of animation that Gifninja can't seem to help me with. This shows Ryan driving his first Pepsi truck, very slowly.

 

 

 

 

I call this one Shenandoah Woman. Almost three-dimensional.