Growing tired of cat grass

(Please note. This is from a site called Sproutpeople.org (link below) that sells seeds for various sprouting things.  I Googled "how to grow cat grass" because my cat loves to eat or at least chew on the ends of grass, and when I grow him a pot of it, it lasts about a week and a half, then dies. Then I have to start all over again, germinating a new pot. I was looking for cat grass with greater longevity, and I came across these astonishing instructions, which I do not expect you to read! Please don't try. But you get the idea. Kitties were never so spoiled as this. It's like starting your own grow-op, in fact, I wish they'd give me instructions for THAT because it would be far more lucrative/worth my time than this. Hey, I'm not dissing this, I'm not. Just saying it's a lot more detailed and intensive than what I'm doing, which is whack some oat grains into a pot of dirt, water it, then wait.)

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Growing Cat Grass

Soak 8 - 12 hours
Rinse / Drain 2 times per day
Plant Day 2
Harvest 6 - 10 days

Wheat, Oats, Rye, Barley, Flax

Salad for your all pets! Our special non-puking formula has pleased many thousands of cats and cat people since 1993. It has also pleased rabbits, dogs, guinea pigs, iguanas, turtles and many more of our other-than-human friends.

All of the seeds in Kat Grass come from sources which are certified organic.

GROWING INSTRUCTIONS

How much you soak depends on the area you are planting - see here. Yields approximately as much Grass (by weight) as Grains planted.

Our Instructions and Notes (below) use Purple Text when referring to growing Grass on a medium other then soil.

Pre-Sprout

Grass will grow much better if you sprout it prior to planting!

Put seed* into a bowl or your Sprouter. Add 2-3 times as much cool (60-70°) water. Mix seeds up to assure even water contact for all. Allow seeds to Soak for 8-12 hours.

Empty the seeds into your sprouter if necessary. Drain off the Soak water. Use it to water plants, or whatever you like. It has nutrients in it.

Rinse thoroughly with cool (60-70°) water and Drain thoroughly.

Set anywhere out of direct sunlight and at room temperature (70° is optimal) between Rinses. This is where your sprouts do their growing. We use a counter top - in the corner of our kitchen, but where the sprouter won't get knocked over by cats, dogs, kids or us. We don't mind the indirect sunlight or the 150 watts of incandescent light, because light just does not matter much. A plant can only perform photosynthesiswhen it has leaves. Until then light has little if any effect. Don't hide your sprouts.

Rinse and Drain again in 8-12 hours. And, perhaps one more... Rinse and Drain in 8-12 hours. And, conceivably one more... Rinse and Drain in 8-12 hours.

The goal is to have a just the hint of a Root - or a very short Root before planting. Most of the seeds will have that hint, or have sprouted tiny (1/16 - 1/8 inch) roots after just 1 or 2 Rinse and Drain cycles.

Planting

Thoroughly moisten the soil. Allow puddles to dry. Sometimes you may need to use your fingers to make sure the soil is moist all the way down to the bottom of the tray. Water, mix, water, mix, etc. Sometimes you don't have to do that - it depends mostly on how dry the soil is before you begin moistening it.

Baby Blanket/Tencel: Prepare the pad: Cut it to fit your Tray if necessary. Soak it in water or better yet, Kelp Fertilizer enriched water (You don't NEED fertilizer for Grass, but we sometimes use it when we grow without soil.) until thoroughly saturated (fold it up and push it into the liquid - use a pot or bowl or something similar to hold it). Unfold it and re-fold differently or do whatever makes sense - the goal is to get the pad THOROUHGLY soaked. Spread the wet pad across the bottom of your Planting Tray.Proceed...

Coconut Coir/Vermiculite: Coconut Coir is our all-time favorite medium. It is absolutely lovely to work with! Both Coconut Coir and Vermiculite absorbs liquid so readily and holds it so supremely that you need little of it. We use 3 Cups for an 10 x 10 inch tray and 6 Cups for an 10 x 20 inch tray. If you're using another tray, make it at least 1/4 - 1/2 inch deep. Spray water evenly across the surface then spread it out as evenly as you can. We like to use Kelp Fertilizer enriched water (You don't NEED fertilizer forGrass, but we sometimes use it when we grow without soil.) so we just pour it on until thoroughly saturated and then spread it out. If you are using one of our Tray Sets, you can use the Drip Tray to help. The amount of liquid to use is this: Vermiculite - a little more than one quart for an 10 x 20 inch tray. You don't want more than a little left in the Drip Tray. Pour off what water remains above the ridges of the Drip Tray.
Coconut Coir: Follow the directions on our Coir page or the package. You may mix in 20-25% Earthworm Castings for nitrogen, but Grass doesn't demand it. Proceed...

Spread seeds evenly on thoroughly moistened soil or medium. Rinse your seeds one last time and then sprinkle them across the planting medium. Spread them out as evenly as you can. We use a lot of grain and though some literature will tell you that your seeds should not ever lay atop each other, we have found from years of experience and thousands of Trays of Grass grown that that is bunk! You will learn for yourself that Grass produces a plant that takes up less room than the grain did, and so to maximize your yield your seeds must lay atop each other to some degree. The thing to watch is this: If you find mold or fungal problems in your Grass then lessen the amount of grain you plant. The hotter/more humid your climate is the more of an issue the mold/fungus is. As always, you need to adapt to your own climate and seasonal conditions. And learn as you go - this is really easy and fun stuff to learn! (Note: emphasis mine).

Cover the planted tray with an inverted tray (the Cover Tray) - to keep light out and moisture in. By inverted I mean that the lip of the Cover Tray rests directly on the lip of the Planting Tray - so the bottom of the Cover Tray is facing up.

Note: Your covering tray should have holes or slits in it so that some air circulation exists. Without this very minimal air flow you might have mold or fungal problems.

Place in a low-light, room temperature location. 70° is always optimal but Grass will grow very well in cooler temperatures also.

Watering

Water lightly once or twice a day. The goal is to keep the sprouts moist until their roots bury themselves in the soil/medium - at which point your goal is to keep the soil/medium moist. Spraying the sprouts is best - whether you use a Spray Bottle or sink/faucet sprayer - just try to make sure that every sprout gets rinsed and quenched until they bury their roots. You may also use some Kelp Fertilizer if you like.

Water the medium. Once the roots are buried, all you need to do is keep the medium moist - the seeds and subsequent Grass will get the moisture they need through their roots. Water from the side if possible, to prevent injuring the tender blades.

The Soilless alternative. Baby Blanket and Tencel will dry out more quickly than soil in most circumstances, so you should either water more often or experiment with our somewhat risky trick:

Use the Drip Tray to hold some water. The roots will actually sit in this, so don't go crazy - too much can drown your plants and/or lead to fungal or mold problems. Just leave as much water as the Grass can drink in a day - and then add more the following day. The amount is dependant on the climate (humidity especially) you're growing in, so you'll have to learn this for yourself. We suggest that you start with 1-2 cups in the Drip Tray. Lift the Planting Tray to see how much is left after 4, 8 and 12 hours. If the Drip Tray is dry add more water - if there is still water 24 hours later then cut back the next time you add water. Pretty simple really, and not as risky as we make it sound - it is really a time saver and can produce happier healthy grass. Leaving too much water for too long will lead to funkiness. The roots can go brown, and the smell will be unpleasant. Just keep an eye open and use common sense. Be the plant!

Once again, we do recommend Kelp Fertilizer enriched water for soilless growers. Soil growers may use it too of course, but the soil does have some nutrients already, so it is not nearly as important for you. If you are using Coconut Coir and have added Earthworm Castings you have no need for kelp.

Vermiculite holds water better than anything except Coconut Coir, but the same method works for it: Use the Drip Tray to hold some water. The roots will eventually grow into this, so don't go crazy - too much can drown your plants and/or lead to fungal or mold problems. Just leave as much water as the Grass and Vermiculite or Coconut Coir can drink in a day and then add more the following day. The amount is dependant on the climate (humidity especially) you're growing in, so you'll have to learn this for yourself. We suggest that you start with 1-2 cups in the Drip Tray. Lift the Planting Tray to see how much is left after 4, 8 and 12 hours. If the Drip Tray is dry add more water - if there is still water 24 hours later then cut back the next time you add water. Pretty simple really, and not as risky as we make it sound - it is really a time saver and produces happier healthy Grass. Use Kelp Fertilizer too if you're using Vermiculite, or didn't enrich your Coir with Earthworm Castings. We probably give more water than is necessary, but we end up with great crops and the Grass keeps growing even after we cut it - even if we don't add water daily.

Greening your Grass

Uncover your Grass on day 3, 4 or 5 - or whenever it's 1-2 inches tall. We usually wait until it pushes the covering tray up (it really will do that - it is remarkable!)

Move to a well lit location If you use direct sunlight (a very good idea for Grass) be prepared to do more watering. Every crop needs more watering when grown in a brighter, hotter location. Keep it moist by watering the soil/medium daily. Watch it grow. It takes about 4 or 5 more days to get to....

Harvest

Harvest by cutting the Grass just above the soil/medium when the Grass is 6 or more inches tall (actually height is just a matter of yield - you can cut it any time you want to).

We believe that you will get the best flavor and nutrition from freshly cut Grass. We cut JUST prior to juicing and we feel the difference! But, you are better off juicing week old Grass than no Grass at all, so do what you must! Drink More Juice!

If you are going to store your crop: During the final 8-12 hours minimize the surface moisture of your Grass - it will store best in your refrigerator if it's dry to the touch. So if you water try to keep the water off the plants - just water the soil/medium.

Transfer your crop to a plastic bag or the sealed container of your choice. We offer a great Produce Storage Bag which extends the shelf life of all produce stored within it. Whatever you use, put your crop in your refrigerator. Use it/juice it as soon as possible.

Amount of Seed to Use

If using Sproutpeople's Single Harvest Pack - use the whole bag on our 5 inch tray (or similar).

Or Use: 1/4 - 1/3 Cups Dry Grain for a 5 inch square Tray. 1 - 2 Cups dry grain for an 10 inch square Tray. 2 - 4 Cups dry grain for for an 10 inch x 20 inch Tray.

The surest way to know what amount of seed to use: Spread dry seed on the bottom of your Tray so that the seed is spread evenly but densely.

(Kitty IS, of course, worth all this. But I'm not likely to try it any time soon. Oats in dirt, that will have to do.

P. S. Here is a rather interesting post, Why Do Cats Eat Grass. The whole site is written in similar fashion. I'm not sure what language this was in originally, but it sure is entertaining. Perhaps it's one of those Google translations.)

Why Do Cats Eat Grass? Cats should stand a little on why eating grass. Because you know why your cat eating grass. You may have an idea about whether it is normal or disease.


Some cat owners may be amazed when they see the grass in the garden of the cat ate with great appetite.Animal behavioral scientists have searched for years for the underlying causes of the eating habits of carnivorous cat grass.

Vitamins they receive from herbs they eat cats (folic acid) helps the digestive system. Cats are vomiting after eating a large majority of grass. Remove the ball down when birds would have bothered stomach. Grass eating is also another benefit laxative effect. The intestines from the stomach allows the ball down to the more comfortable excretion. The general belief that they ate grass for cats is sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes stomach that just because they like the taste. Hair pulling the ball independently sore throat, eat grass to vomit sick cats as well.

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My Day

It went kind of like this.

The worst doesn't happen - except when it does

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/behind-the-trump-phenomenon

Herein is a link to a pretty good piece in the New Yorker about the Trump phenomenon. I don't know if I have anything more to add. My husband, who is far more politically astute than me, said "he's the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats" and "he will leave the Republican party in ruins, so they will have to rebuild out of the rubble and become a viable party again." Let's hope he's right.

I get frightened at the things that are happening, but if I say much about it I'm a party pooper, fearful, a depressive, and blah blah blah. I am a human being in fear because of what I see all around me. And yet. I am mindful of the fact that when I wrote a starkly honest post about these fears, I lost four longtime followers within a few hours. I didn't even know my followers followed me, but apparently they do when the message is too dire, then decide to hang up the phone. Does this hurt? What do you think? I love my readers, even if I don't know them, and abandonment is always hard.

The worst doesn't usually happen, except when it does (Hiroshima, Nazi Germany, Hurricane Katrina, and all the school shootings that I can no longer keep track of - and this is by no means a comprehensive list, just what popped into my brain in the first few seconds). Am I tempted to despair? You bet  I am. On a personal level, I cope by cleaving very closely to my family and all its beloved aspects, my 40+-year marriage, and even - gulp - my writing, though I just received some news that makes me wonder if I should laugh or cry.

The Glass Character, the novel I have created a whole blog for, a whole Facebook page for, and to which I surrendered my hope and my heart, sold three copies in all of 2015. This is not just a failure, this is a literary catastrophe. To sell this number, you'd have to post vitriolic, insulting tirades every day telling everyone they're full of shit and should not go near my book. It is barely possible, but it says so right on my royalty statement, which is several hundred dollars in the red. I literally owe my publisher some pretty big bucks for failing on this level.

I'm trying to figure it out. I wasn't going to say anything. Everyone says, of course, that failure is no disgrace, that it is a badge of honour because "you tried" and learned something and should just try, try again. OK then: if it is indeed no disgrace, here goes, I'm going to write about it right now!

From observation and personal experience, however, I think the opposite is true.  I have observed that failure blights your personal vibe and renders you unwashed, a pariah, box office poison. It does. You have to play it down. One costly mistake can be the end of everything. I've written about this before, risking party-pooperhood again.

I'm going to excerpt something I sent my publisher, because this blog is my refuge now and the only thing I am going to be writing for any sort of public consumption from now on.

"I’ve been going over and over this issue in my head and wondering whether to address it will make things better or worse, but leaving it alone will be too painful for me, so I guess I had better make an attempt.

I received my royalty statement yesterday and saw that my novel sold three copies in all of 2015. This seemed like an impossibility to me, either a mistake or probably the worst sales record in publishing history. I did not expect my novel to break sales records, as my other two novels were modest sellers in spite of outstanding reviews. This novel, for whatever reason, did not get reviewed at all and did not get many of those all-important five-star blurbs on Amazon because I was not able or willing to enter the barter system (I’ll five-star yours if you’ll five-star mine) in order to procure them.

I am saying this not to be defensive or apologetic, and I know in the long run it won’t make any difference, but to say I can just brush off this magnitude of failure in my life’s work is unrealistic. I don’t know why, but perhaps because of sheer loneliness I just have to say something. One can’t reveal this kind of thing publicly because in this era of social media, one must always save face and put one’s best foot forward, and this face is just about the worst I’ve seen! You have to be a success to be a success.

Though due to health/family/financial constraints I was unable to put together a major book tour, which would have involved trying to get myself invited to events when no one had heard of my work, I did do what I could locally to promote the book and had a successful and very enjoyable launch. I set up a Facebook page specifically for the novel and have kept it up, and have been writing a blog called The Glass Character since 2010. I had gained a number of contacts, or I hoped I did, in the silent film world, and approached them with the book to see if there was interest. This included Gerry Orlando (who runs the San Francisco silent film festival), Jeffrey Vance (Lloyd biographer), Rich Correll, a Hollywood film producer/director who knew Harold Lloyd personally and who phoned me out of the blue from Los Angeles to tell me he loved the excerpts I sent him and wanted to see the whole book (never to hear from him again – he stopped answering my emails), Kevin Brownlow who is the world’s foremost expert on silent film and was generous enough to write a blurb (the one person who has been good to me and kept up a correspondence), the Lloyd family, including Suzanne Lloyd who is CEO of Harold Lloyd Entertainment, a few other HL biographers, and – well, is there much point to this? Obviously it was futile and led to no interest at all. And I am aware the whole thing was long-shot: I am not naïve about it.

I know the publishing world has changed a lot, and I must not be a publicity genius or this never would have happened, but three copies. Though there is a lot of lip service paid to “failure is good, it’s great, it’s how you learn”, it is socially stigmatized and shameful. It actually is, and the repercussions can be fatal to a writing career, especially if your books tank at the box office three times in a row. If you somehow manage to pick yourself up and go on to great success, it looks fine on your resume, you’re seen as the comeback kid and praised, but that’s not going to happen here because I can’t and won’t go through this again.

I don’t know what I was expecting here, but I will tell you I feel really badly that you took such a bath on this. You ended up seriously in the hole with me, and it feels awful. I will pay back what I owe, and I am not kidding, I will do that if it will help, bad as it feels. I know that’s not what is done, but I will do it because this is probably an unusual case and small publishers are struggling hard enough as it is. An author should not “earn” minus hundreds of dollars for her book – it is either funny or baffling or just heartbreaking. I do not ever intend to offer my fiction for publication again, I mean anywhere, as I am unable to detach myself from “how it did”, though I guess I am supposed to.

I don’t know how to play this game, obviously, if that’s what it is, though I know it shouldn’t be. Canadian literature is honoured worldwide as being of the highest quality. I cannot forget that my first novel received over 25 reviews, almost all of them very positive, and that my second  novel Mallory was favorably compared in the Globe and Mail to the work of Alice Munro, a Nobel prize-winner. OK, am I bragging here or just scrambling for points? I shouldn’t do that, obviously, and yet I shouldn’t NOT do it.  I didn’t do enough of it or I would have sold more than three books. There is something so awkward about being self-serving enough to push your book aggressively, because it is seen as just so un-Canadian and you can expect a lot of putdowns for it. Yet at one and the same time, if you don’t do it you’re missing the boat.

I have to tell you that writing this novel, which now must be its own reward, was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my writing experience (I guess I can’t say career). Having it accepted by Thistledown was nothing short of thrilling, and I had high hopes for it. I appreciate the faith you had in me to give me this chance.  It had been a long time since my last book came out, however, and in that time I had unwittingly morphed into a dinosaur, with my past work seen as almost a liability: I was that fatal thing, an “old school writer”. It seemed that suddenly everyone was an author, and some real crap was hitting the fan (Fifty Shades, etc.) and becoming bestseller material. Since I wasn’t sure how to navigate these waters, I did what I could and sold three books and now wonder how that even could have happened.

It’s a little late for a post-mortem, I guess, or what I could or should or couldn’t or shouldn’t have done. But it is too bad I had to agonize about whether I should even speak to this or just zip it up, keep it to myself and try to carry on. This is embarrassing, if not humiliating, and I do have my pride. There is no way to win this at this point, or contemplate what I might have done or should have done or shouldn’t have done, and it is really a very disappointing way to end my fiction-writing career, but here it must end. The other day I made a passing reference to “writing another novel” and my husband got a look on his face, not just pained but anguished, and said, “Margaret, please, please don’t do that.”  He was being truly supportive of me in saying this.

Thistledown gave me an opportunity here, perhaps a roll of the dice, but for that I am still grateful in spite of how it turned out. I hope this isn’t seen as a rant, which it is not meant to be, but a cri du coeur, just something I had to say because not saying it was killing me. I do appreciate your reading this, and I don’t ask for you to try to make it better, but I guess I just had to say it.

Again, I am grateful for the chance to work with you."

Why do I do this, publicize and broadcast such a jaw-dropping failure? Because I'm sick of hiding it. As Bob Dylan once said, "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose." (He also said "he not busy being born is busy dying," and today I'm not sure which one I am.) It's true. I'm not trying to "gain" anything here either. Maybe it's a bit of a cautionary tale, however. I do think I'm a good writer and don't need to be bolstered. But I have long believed that a storyteller needs an audience. We don't expect a concert pianist who has trained for ten years to play in an empty hall, but when writers want readers, they're seen as egotists. If they DON'T get that readership, they're seen as failures.

I love the book world anyway, because I love books, damn it, damn it all, and now here I am near tears. Everyone keeps saying "but only the format is changing, books will always be books". Books will always be books if they are READ, but if they aren't read they're objects lying around the house, just things to be dusted, or - worse - pulped. My second book was recently pulped, meaning that no copies now exist of it, nor ever will. It has turned back into a tree, which is maybe some kind of backhanded magic.

I can't unwrite. I can't untell. I can't unwish. I can't undream. I can't unhope or go back to age eight and say to that eager little girl, "no, Margaret, you can't write books, not because you 'can't' but because no one will ever read them." 

But I can stop, and I have stopped already, I won't do this any more. I guess I will still feed this blog because, for the most part, I enjoy doing it. It's a form of play for me, of recreation, and (sometimes) a way to rejoice or lament or just write about something I really care about. Sometimes I get ten views, sometimes (well, once) 100,000, but I'd keep on even if I got three views a year. Or, probably, none.

So that's something, isn't it? Is the dream still alive? No, it's dead, and now I must bury it. I will never again be a published novelist. Is there a smaller number than three copies a year? Two? One? Zero? I don't think I can get anyone on-board with figures like that.

But since I need to write to survive psychologically, that part of it will go on. When I look back on my life right this minute, all I can remember is sadness, sorrow, slights, people being dismissive or contemptuous or saying mean things to me, tears and embarrassment. I can't remember any of the good stuff because I'm in a mini-depression over the three copies. No one has to read this, however! But it's out there, hanging in the wind like some strange, dream-shaped chime, a glass chime with glass characters that reflect my all-too-breakable glass heart.

Dancing mania: they laugh! They dance! They scream!

Ye-e-e-e-s, it's that wacky bunch of Pentecostals, the Kenneth Hagin gang! They dance! They laugh! They scream! They roll around on the floor! It's hard to believe that religious people can behave this way, but it sure looks like they do. To me it has a kind of sexual component to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The Shakers, known for their complete abstinence from all sexual activity (which is why the sect died out quite a long time ago) used to whirl around and dance madly when overtaken by the Spirit, but it was not quite like this. Nothing else is quite like this. This is a bunch of adults acting like idiots, behaving more immaturely than toddlers who generally have far better self-control. The idea is that God is filling them with the Holy Ghost to the point that they start to flail around involuntarily, but I don't believe it. Most of it looks faked. There are people who get up and dance around and then go and sit down again, their part of the performance over.

My favourite moment is around the 9:03 mark, where a guy rolls down the stairs, leaving a gun sitting on the step behind him. Obviously it fell out of his pocket as he was holy-rollin' along like that. Personally, I'd be scared of an evangelical who was armed. And wouldn't it be interesting to do a weapons count in this crowd. How many are exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms? All the time, I mean, even in a religious meeting? But maybe they need to be armed here more than anywhere else.

I am at the point in my life now where I don't understand religion at all. And this from someone who was a lay minister and Bible teacher for 15 years. No kidding. But if this is Christianity, then forget it. These are not Christians. They're crazy in the head to begin with, and fork over all their hard-earned money to fuckwits like Hagin. The bizarre thing is that there are tons of "straight" videos of Hagin giving sermons that are, while not exactly my cup of evangelical tea, almost sane. They're in plain English anyway, with no barking or guffawing. He had quite a reputation as a sort of charismatic Billy Graham type, until his ministry took a turn for the supremely silly.

This laughing/flailing idiocy was originally called the Toronto Blessing and took place in a church near an airport. Maybe all the noise drove them to it, who knows. The Hagin videos were made some time in the '90s, and it would be interesting to know where these people are now. How many of them stayed with it. Or if this sort of orgy still goes on, or was it just a fad? I also wonder what happens in the hotel rooms where the participants stay during these big crusade thingammies. I just think it could turn sexual at the drop of someone's pants.

ADDENDA.

Tanganyika laughter epidemic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria – or mass psychogenic illness (MPI) – rumored to have occurred in or near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) near the border of Uganda.

The laughter epidemic began on January 30, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha. The laughter started with three girls and spread haphazardly throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12–18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days in those affected. The teaching staff were not affected but reported that students were unable to concentrate on their lessons. The school was forced to close down on March 18, 1962.

After the school was closed and the students were sent home, the epidemic spread to Nshamba, a village that was home to several of the girls.  In April and May, 217 people had laughing attacks in the village, most of them being school children and young adults. The Kashasha school was reopened on May 21, only to be closed again at the end of June. In June, the laughing epidemic spread to Ramashenye girls’ middle school, near Bukoba, affecting 48 girls.

The school from which the epidemic sprang was sued; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off. The following symptoms were reported on an equally massive scale as the reports of the laughter itself: pain, fainting, flatulence, respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying, and random screaming. In total 14 schools were shut down and 1000 people were affected.

Dancing Mania

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St John's Dance and, historically, St. Vitus' Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, Germany, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, France.

Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania.

The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is, however, thought to be as a mass psychogenic illness in which the occurrence of similar physical symptoms, with no known physical cause, affect a large group of people as a form of social influence.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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So mild, so pure: TV ads in the '50s

I find that early '50s TV ads make the most intriguing gifs. Advertising style was pretty aggressive then, as nobody quite knew how to marry pictures with sound. Announcers intoned in radio-like voices, with that strange theatrical diction from the 1940s that somehow suggests the formal urgency of wartime.

One of the features of these ads is very (VERY) strange animation, much of it primitive or downright incomprehensible. On very early TV shows, credits were written on some sort of material like canvas and pulled along manually, or cards dropped down with a "flop".  All this is of great fascination to me, as I have vague memories of some of the later-'50s ones, though as a small child (infant!), I had no real comprehension of them. Ads got a lot more sophisticated in the early '60s, and by mid-to-late they were sort of quirky and self-consciously nutty/hippie-ish in a painful effort to be hip.

Here is one of those offputting animations from Birdseye. Frozen food was still kind of a novelty then, and the icebox was a thing of the past. There are even a few ads for frost-free refrigerators, which I didn't have until the 80s! I do remember those pans of hot water and the chisel used to hack out 3"-thick slabs of frosted ice that had been there for years. Once I managed to gouge the inside of the freezer and release freon gas all over the place, necessitating a visit from a repairman. Very nasty.

People don't realize how literally in-your-face TV ads were then. Everything was blasted at you, often spinning around like those newspaper headlines in 1940s gangster movies. This ad talks about "blueing" (I think that's how you spell it), which I am not even familiar with, but I think it was an ingredient added when washing white laundry to keep it from yellowing. Cheer was revolutionary in that it incorporated all that lovely blueing, which is even now endangering species and killing fish in their billions.

One of the big obsessions of the 1950s was nutrition/sturdy health and helping your children build strong bodies - eight ways in this ad, but later on, twelve. This is, of course, an ad for Wonder Bread, a product wildly popular in the post-boom era and later satirized as the epitome of Eisenhower-ish blandness and WASP-y insularity/xenophobia. In this ad, a skinny kid, the equivalent of the guy who gets sand kicked in his face, discovers the nutritional wonders of Wonder Bread and begins to stuff himself with it. Soon he begins to win medals in track and field. I am still searching for that iconic (sorry, but it is) ad where the kid grows in height from toddler to adulthood in about three seconds. Haven't found it yet, but it took me ten years to find "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!", so it's only a matter of time.

Variations on the theme of nutrition. Back then, people actually did pay attention to what was in their food, but it had nothing to do with additives. In fact, the more additives, the better the product. In this case, Billy's animal friends are blasting messages at him about various nutrients, though very strangely, from the pages of a huge book
.

Billy blinking. These animations could be drawn in a single swipe of the pen, and probably were. Disney they weren't, but somehow they got the message across. In fact, I really like this one. Most gifs aren't that smooth and circular.

This is a real gem, with exceptionally primitive animation. Looks like a background being manually dragged across the screen, with cutout heads superimposed. Palmolive shows up a lot in these ad compilations. The name itself makes me feel ickily oily. I don't know if there was olive oil or palm oil in these products or not, but the name is somehow claustrophobic and "close". Suffocating, almost, and definitely oleaginous. It brings to mind Polly Bergen and her revolting "Oil of the Turtle" products, about which I can find practically nothing (though if I check the internet in a few months, there will be seventeen different sites devoted to it).

I like this, because even though nothing happens in it, it has that shakiness and graininess I prize. I'm not sure why everything jerked up and down like this, but it did. Often there was a ten- or even fifteen-second freeze on a picture of the product at the end of these ads.

I'm afraid I lost track of what product this was, but I thought it was delightfully bizarre. It uses the same animation techniques as Francis the Talking Mule and those "I want a Clark Bar" ads. 

One of the things I notice, as I watch these late at night, is how long they are. Most are a full minute, and some are several minutes (especially car commercials, which last an eternity and all seem the same to me, as if the cars are interchangeable). If that doesn't seem very long, try watching a one-minute ad. Just when you think it's winding up, it starts all over again. We are subjected to anywhere from four to ten ads in one minute now, with some of them lasting mere seconds, jamming ten times the information into our already-overburdened brains.

I'm not saying it was "better" then. Children could get polio and black people were barred from hotels and women were expected to stay in the kitchen and defrost their freezers. Life was simpler and slower, for sure. I've always been able to read at light speed, with the result of feeling like everyone/everything else was moving very slowly around me, as in that Star Trek episode where there were two frequencies. I like the internet because it's hyper-fast, and you can get information about pretty much anything in seconds.

But then I find myself watching these ancient ads and giffing them. I gif mainly because sitting through a one-minute commercial seems interminable. So here, I give you only the best parts! A lot of people simply hate gifs because they only see the dreadful, jerky two-second ones that almost everyone makes. And why? Why make such crappy ones? I don't know. I used to go on a site called Gifsforum - but never mind, it's dead and buried now. When I find old Gifsforum gifs I made years ago, they are epics, going forwards and backwards, at three different speeds, with colour turned to sepia or black and white, and on and on. Special effects. My grandkids can do stuff on their ipods that is light-years ahead of this: put themselves in rock videos with stop motion, lip-synching, kaleidoscopic visual effects, and all sorts of stuff, while these poky little twenty-second movies seem unimpressive.

But they save you time. If you want the nugget of something, gif it. That's what I always say. Squawk, squawk, squawk.

POST-BLOG GLOB. I decided to gif an entire one-minute ad here, because of the unusual clarity of it and because it epitomizes food ads from the era, especially products for children like cereal and bread. Remember Grape Nuts? If you don't, you're lucky. They were hard, granular bullets that were about as appetizing as Purina Dog Chow. No doubt they had no more protein (an obsession with these ads, often pronounced "protean" as if it had mythological powers) than a bowl of wood shavings. But this ad also incorporates the fatigued child being dragged off to eat cereal, which solves everything and makes for a hap-hap-happy family!

Were families happier then? I don't know. I look back on that time as golden, and have dreams of Chatham that are almost ecstatic, though at least from age ten I know I was miserable. Before that, who knows? Milk was delivered by horse-and-wagon, and ads looked something like this. We ate Grape Nuts and got our protean, and built strong bodies, either eight or twelve ways. At least the pace was slower, and people could sit still for a whole 60 seconds at a time.

Warm tip: a literal translation

(The following are instructions for cleaning a Pusheen stuffed animal, which I am thinking of ordering from a Third World vendor. One of my literally-translated gems.)

[ warm tip]

Maintenance and cleaning method of plush toys

Plush dirty, not easy to clean after washing and easy to curl. A simple method without water.

To the market to buy a bag of large grain of salt (also known as the sun and salt, about 2 kg), home after looking for a clean plastic bag (to be able to

Hold), then take a small amount of Oshio placed in plastic bags, you're going to get rid of inside, the bag mouth department good, began to make

Strong shaking, about 40 times, out of plush toys, the surface sticky salt particle shaking clean, you will find the salt black hair.

Cashmere toys clean a lot of.

This is because the salt itself with a plus or minus, and dirt will have a positive and negative charge, the friction of the friction, the opposite sex, salt

Will the dirt away, the plush toys clean

Will not be lost hair?

Each one is not lost hair, but because the toy is mostly plush fabric, processing will have a lot of floating hair stuck in the above, we send

Before all the workers took it with a vacuum cleaner to suck, but the daily delivery volume is too big, we do not have a bear to suck on a half

Days, so you receive the above number is still possible to have a bit of the hair, as long as the suction or blowing machine with a vacuum cleaner

, also can be outside a good pat on the no, if it is a hair with hand gently pull will fall, and has been falling,

Is not Yo, the hair is not good treatment, floating hair can be dealt with.

Sure you have a headache

Film leader countdowns

 

What are you, chicken? . . . YES: I AM CHICKEN!