Gigantic cat head conquers Tokyo!

A group of students at the Japan School of Wool Art have created a startlingly realistic, gigantic wool felt cat head that can be worn as a mask. The project was led by the students’ art teacher, Housetu Sato.

The head will be on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from April 18-23, 2015. Although there are no current plans to make more or sell the giant cat head, the recent online attention the artwork is generating may change things…

[via Laughing Squid]

Introducing the EGG MASTER!

Kitchen gadgets review: the Egg Master – a horrifying, unholy affair

I can’t look at the hot sweating mess that emerges from the Egg Master’s opening, let alone eat it

The egg roll writhes like an alien parasite in search of a host body … Rhik Samadder testing the Egg Master. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

What?

The Egg Master is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured into the plastic tube are heated by an embedded, wraparound element. When ready, food spontaneously rises from the device.
Why?

Because there is no God.

The Egg Master has to be observed in all its slow-mo action to be truly appreciated.

Well?

This week’s gadget describes itself as “a new way to prepare eggs”, which is accurate in the way that chopping off your legs could be described as a new way to lose weight. Let’s start with that name, its unsettling taint of S&M, an overtone consistent with the design. In hot pink and stippled black rubber, Egg Master’s exterior screams cut-price, mail-order adult toy; its funnelled hole suggests terrible uses. And it has a traffic light on it, for some reason.

“Spray non-stick agent into container”, the box advises, which definitely gets the tummy rumbling. As instructed, I crack two whole eggs into the hot tunnel, trying to ignore the gurgling sound from within. It’s impossible to see what’s going on – but it smells bad. I squint into the dark opening. A bulging yellow sac peers back at me. Minutes pass; the smell does not. Then, without warning, a flaccid, spongy log half jumps from the machine, writhing like an alien parasite in search of a host body. It’s horrifying, like a scene from The Lair of the White Worm.

I can’t look at it, let alone eat it. To stall, I consult the badly photocopied handbook, which suggests other delicious treats this baby is good for. Egg Master Egg Crackers, which is mixed-up crackers, egg and cheese; Egg Master Egg Dog; PB&J (peanut butter and jelly) Egg Master, and the tantalising Cuban Egg Master. It’s a dossier of culinary hate crimes (barbecue Pork Egg Master has two ingredients, “biscuit dough and three teaspoons of precooked pork”). Nervously, I try the sulphuric, sweating egg mess before me. The taste is … not the best. As I dry heave into the sink, I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it? Maybe no one. Perhaps soon, sooner than you think, we will all bow to the Egg Master.

Redeeming features?

It’s quite space-efficient, being so dense with evil. The box contains free wooden skewers, to defend yourself from your food, and a pipe cleaner to swab the device, although no holy water to soak it in.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?

Under the floorboards. 5/5. Just kidding. 0/5.

Wait, there's more!

I'm sorry. . . no, really.

There's a word for that

Since a non-updated blog is worse than a neglected lawn, here is something that is doing the rounds. No one can ever accuse me of stealing anything, ever again, because everything is everywhere, especially on the completely useless Pinterest which does NOT give you links to that cute knitting pattern that you crave so much.

It just shows you what the things are. There. Look. Done.

This sounds a bit like something you'd say after a sneeze (and by the way, I HATE "bless you" because it is not only useless, it is prissy, antiquated and implies that sneezing is so Satanic that we have to say a little incantation over it, to which you are supposed to/HAVE to reply, "thank you," even if you hate the custom like worms.)

I have a lot of these. By the way, have you ever noticed how useless coasters are? All the water from condensation pools up on them, then when you pick your glass up (unsticking it from the coaster first), the accumulation dribbles wetly down your front. I have designed my own coasters made of felt glued to cork, various fabrics, and even hollowed-out sponge that fastens to the bottom of the glass. No one seems to want these.

Oh yes, we all know this one but never coined a word for it. Happens at least once a week around here, when two of the grandgirls, the blondie Scandinavian-looking ones, drop by. By the way, where did such white-blonde hair come from in our family system? Their mother is a dark brunette, and any blondeness in the rest of the family is of the dirty/darkened variety. How far back does this stuff go? 

GLORY be to God for dappled things 

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings. . . 

I think this is a nice way of saying "rude annoying none-o'-yer-bizness" types. What's it to you? Why do you want to know? You Pochemuchka.

That's always the sweetest part, isn't it? The dessert after the dessert. That time when you're just not quite ready to break up the party. That little conversation in the parking lot of the restaurant that doesn't quite want to end.

This isn't quite the same as "Jayzus!!", but conveys a similar sentiment as you listen, for perhaps the 14th time, to a good joke told very badly. Even worse than that is the fake, polite way people laugh at it, because you're supposed to laugh at a joke. Next time you're at a social function, count the laughs. At the end of the evening, do a tally: how many were genuine laughs, and how many were fake, social ha-ha-ha-ha-has?

I would do anything in Hawaiian, even scratch my head to remember something. I love the place, love the soft embrace of the air and the way you can go about in a bathing suit with jiggling legs and a jiggling fanny, and nobody cares. 

I had this in the States once, and couldn't wait to get out of there. We have so much bad press/bad vibes piped our way from news items and the popular culture that it's easy to believe they're all a bunch of pistol-packin' yahoos. It's a distortion created in part by the American press, ironically, though Canadians do their share of high-horsitude about it all, as if we're not also rotten with petty crime and gang wars.  But I think  that, in a manner of speaking, the good folk in the United States generally trump the bad.

Uh, so you buy, it, I guess.

Never thought it was roadlike, more moonlike, but it does move around a lot, doesn't it? 

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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TAXI DRIVER with Woody Allen

One of the best re-cuts I've seen. I've been obsessed with Taxi Driver for years, and can never rip myself away from it when it comes on TV. It's that musical score, I think, and DeNiro's hypnotic monotone voice. The Mohawk, the white dress, the clapping, the bloody walls. It's all here, folks - and Woody Allen, too.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Falling in love again: damn you, Harold!

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I can't help it

Love's always been my game

Play it how I may

I was made that way

I can't help it

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn

I know I'm not to blame

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I just can't help it

I am a sap. And I know it. For years now - YEARS - I have pursued this elusive, illusive wild aquatic fowl, as Spock would put it. I have run around and around chasing my own tail.

There is a pattern to this. Falling like a shot sparrow, or an elk with an arrow through its heart, I lie quivering, seemingly dead. Then, mysteriously, sometimes years later, something happens.

I don't know how it happens.

I can't help but feel that my third published novel failed just as disastrously as the first two. I don't know why this is, except that I am not a very good hustler. In today's atmosphere of kill or be killed, that's as fatal as not being able to write at all.

I doubt if I will ever know how to play this game, and that admission is supposed to bring great humiliation down on me. At the same time, I am supposed to smile and act as if everything is fine. There is a slow trickle of articles from people "admitting" they have needed help for depression and other forms of mental illness. But it's quickly tucked away again as we put on our game face and get back out into the fray.

For that's how we "win", isn't it?

Harold enchanted me and totally took me over. I walk away, storm away, over and over again, after a year or couple of years, and I am sure it's "over", which I believe it actually is. So why then am I sending out yet another copy to someone in Los Angeles, making one more email attempt to reach someone in the UK? All my attempts to get someone to notice my book are so far-fetched, they are practically ludicrous, and I might as well save myself the postage. I always feel embarrassed to do any of it, but I am pulled back and forth because I also feel tremendous pressure to do it. And I should be doing it a  whole lot better than this.

Death never appealed to me much, either the death of my novels/dreams, or my own. I keep getting up again. It's stupid. Everything I do here is stupid because nobody sees it or cares anyway. But if I say so, I risk looking like a loser. So let's stay chipper.

Never wanted to. What am I to do? I can't help it.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Degraded humanity: Nazi baby farm

This is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen: a Nazi "baby farm", the preferred method of raising the next generation of Superbeings to serve the Third Reich.

So deluded were they that they seemed to believe that rough-handling infants, slinging them around by the feet and massing them together like a product was the best and most efficient way of producing a healthy population of emotionless thugs for the Third Reich. They look like they are all the same age and size, reminding me most horribly of the rigid uniformity in Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will  They resemble plucked chickens who have somehow survived processing and evisceration. Most of these would either have been kidnapped from invaded countries (if their Aryan blood was deemed to be pure) or bred from blonde-haired maidens and officers in the elite corps of the SS.

How could this happen? we ask over and over again. It's the same thing that happens in cults. People surrender their will. So much for triumph. Babies en masse, surrendered to the Cause. Brains facing forward, all without a single thought.

Laughing Buddha: the Dalai Lama giggle reel

Be it known that there are very few things, or people, in this world that give me hope. I think in 50 years this planet will be so degraded that billions will have died, and conditions will be intolerable for the rest, perhaps the worst humanity has ever known. And as humanity is wont to do, the remainder will simply tear each other apart.

BUT MEANTIME, we have this lovely man, this laughing Buddha, this Dalai Lama who has become such a profound spiritual leader for saying such simple things. Simple, but perhaps not easy. I'd make a gif of this, but. . . you've got to draw the line somewhere. Since he has been around for a long time, there are even photos of His Holiness with Thomas Merton, but we won't go there.

So, between the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis and Malala, will humanity make it? No. But at least the slide down into unimageinable hell will be, perhaps, a little less horrendous.

Bobblehead Pope Francis: I want one of these!

 

Though I have never loved anything Catholic, I love Pope Francis. I don't think I need to tell you why And though I have never owned a bobblehead, I am seriously considering buying one of these.

Catholic meant those other kids we never played with, though I don't remember being told not to. They walked in the opposite direction to school. Catholic meant kids in uniform, and those bizarrely short pleated skirts that barely covered the girls' bums.

Catholic meant Blessed Sacrament School and The Pines convent on Ursaline Avenue, where I had to go for my violin lessons. Shit-scary place, looked medieval, if I had known what that meant.

Catholic meant exorcisms and stuff like that, and Mary, a big deal over Mary who was very much a supporting player to us Protestant kids.

Being Irish, Catholics represented a deep, unspeakable schism. We just "knew". Just as my uncritical grandma from northern Ireland described people from the south of Ireland as "rather common", Catholics would have been described as Papists, if they were spoken of at all.

But I don't have to think about any of that any more, because, like a miracle, we have Pope Francis, who makes more sense than any spiritual leader since the Dalai Lama.

And I love him, too.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Weirdball gifs

BACKSTORY. I got watching The Bandwagon again last night, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, the incomparable Oscar Levant, etc. Astaire gave one of the best graceful, effortless comic performances of his career.

These odd little gifs aren't from that show. That show has a very, very strange number in it called Triplets, in which Astaire and Nanette Fabray and that other guy (? It was supposed to be Levant, but his knees were shot) play three supposedly-identical babies. I think they did it with their shoes on their knees. Long ago, I saw a sort of surreal version of this number in Spanish and posted it somewhere on my blog. But do you think I could find it? How to search for it? Spanish version of Triplets? There went my idea for a great gif.

Somehow I ended up with this strange number, Astaire with Eleanor Powell, one of his better dance partners (though the public loved Ginger more). But my usual program, Gifsforum, is down AGAIN and I had to use MakeaGif, which doesn't make a gif very well. You can go up to 20 seconds on them, which is nice, but look at how they come out! Jerk-a-rama. I decided to go for it and use it for effect. There are much better-quality clips of this dance, but I liked the surreal phosphorescence of this one.

Not About Thomas Merton: escort cards of yesteryear

  

Now these are interesting, sort of. One of them things you see on Facebook, a link-to rather, while you're scrollin' along trying to ignore unbelievably hot-air-inflated, narcissistic swaggering and self-absorbed primping by writers who want you to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are More Successful Than You (while pretending to bewail the fact that they only sold 250 copies at their latest book-signing). Never mind. So you click on it, and sometimes it's interesting. More often than not it's a time-waster. But this is a little piece of sociological history. I didn't know about these things, presumably passed from a gentleman to a lady, and I am not at all sure what the exact meaning of it was, or the protocol. Was the gentleman in question really supposed to walk the lady home for reasons of safety? So she wouldn't have to traverse those dangerous streets alone?

"I shall be miserable if I can't love you" can be taken any number of ways, as can the description "sensible and good". He seems to be saying "your virtues are all on display, now please can I take them away"?

Hell, these are pickup things. What else COULD they be? How could you hand one of these cheesy things to someone you already know, and if you DON'T know her, doesn't the whole thing smack of "transaction"?

Think about it, though. If a lady walked alone, particularly in the evening, it sent a particular message. Kind of like all those elaborate signals you could send with a fan (like "come hither" or "up yours"). This one sounds like something out of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical: "my style and complexion/going in your direction". Selection, affection: cute. But this innuendo-laden promise of "protection" is starting to remind me of an ad for Trojans.

Cute devil cartoons aside, the whispers between the lines are interesting. "Confidential card", "between ourselves": these don't seem to bespeak a jolly little talk between a lady and gent as he accompanies her a few blocks to her front porch. These seem to hint at Something Else.

Why am I suddenly thinking of Belle Watling's whorehouse in Gone with the Wind?

Here's a good one, with a little Cupid-esque figure on it. It talks about "appointing time and place for an interview" - and I don't think they mean for a typing job. The droll misspelled postscript "enter nous" seems to have a double meaning, somehow.

So. If she won't go home with him, he wants to reserve the privilege of staring at her as she walks by. Creepy.

This one expresses more ardour, or else is more arduous than the others. Strangely, two amphibia frolic (with no clothes on!), and "blissful" pleasure is hinted at. The card-bearer and his potential inamorata are "two souls with but a single thought; two hearts that beat as one". Very, very interesting indeed.

More ogling from the fence. Miawwwwww!

Sa-a-a-a-a-ay, are these cards really what I think they are?  For if they are, all this is beginning to seem a bit pink about the edges.

And I ask you, what could be so erotically-charged as an oven mitt? Such a signal could leave no doubt as to a gentleman's intentions. God only knows what those initials stand for.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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What rhymes with penis? The worst gif in the history of mankind

I was watching one of those wretched Top Ten YouTube videos, very late at night when my brain is basically on another planet, when I discovered Top Ten Worst TV Spinoffs. The Dukes of Hazzard was bad enough, with its idiot characters and free display of the Confederate flag (not to mention that irritating car horn and all the cars flying through the air), but here is evidence of a (mercifully) short-lived spinoff called Enos. I don't want to know who Enos was, but his name rhymes with penis and his police car flies through the air. Good God, who'd make a gif out of this??