How to Use the Telephone

Horrible, just horrible (with very bad poems!)

You know one of those horrible dreams that you can't get out of, and finally you wake up and you're in a horrible dream that you can't get out of, and finally you wake up and you're in a horrible dream that you can't get out of?

Horrible, horrible man at the door

man at the door

man at the door

Horrible, horrible man at the door

Horrible man at the window.

I am on your hand, but 

I don't understand.

Who you are or

What that thing is on your head,

Why is that thing on your head.

When your face rots like that,

It makes me crazy,

When your face rots like that,

I feel like I have rabies.

The best meat is here, no, the best meat is here,

It's very clear 

to me

That the (very) best meat is here.

I have to smile, oh

I have to smile,

because it makes me

gladsome

Just after a while!

Hoolihan & Big Chuck - Certain Ethnic Six Dollar Man

Probably better than most H & BC sketches, in that it has a broad silent-comedy kind of feel to it - oh hell, ain't it just hilarious when all his body parts fly off? Yes, it IS! You can't show that sort of stuff any more, or if you do, you can't laugh at it. So laugh!

The Earth Dies Screaming 1965 - trailer

When it comes to campy horror flicks from the Cold War era, less is more: meaning, I never watch them. Watching the trailer is enough, and making gifs from the trailer is even better. That way you get to watch the handful of seconds in the 87-minute movie which have any suspense in them at all.

I did watch these, in their entirety, as a kid, when as a rare treat I was allowed to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the den on Friday nights. There would always be some sort of creature feature on Hoolihan and Big Chuck, a local Cleveland horror movie/comedy show that was one part Ernie Kovacs, three parts smoked kielbasa and - the rest of it, I don't know, I guess it was sort of funny.

Count Floyd on SCTV was a sort of rough takeoff on these locally-hosted quasi-scary shows, usually presenting execreble no-budget horror movies. I noted recently that there is still a show on KVOS ("ME TV!") called Svengoolie - forgive me if I spelled that wrong - which tries to do the same thing. Doesn't make it, but it tries. And I vaguely remember another one named Ghoulardi. Sounds vaguely Hungarian to me (but so was Kovacs. Just a coincidence? I. . . don't. . . think. . . so!).

Though we groaned over these (the "we" meaning me and my older brothers, who often crashed my den party, usually drunk or stoned), the scary-badness of them was always the least interesting part of the evening. In fact, Hoolihan (a Cleveland radio announcer named Bob Wells) and Big Chuck (a big chuck) usually didn't even refer to the movie. They did sketches that were mostly lame, such as a Western called The Kielbasa Kid, and some really transparently Kovacs-esque stuff such as Readings by Robert, a clone of Percy Dovetonsils.  At the time I knew nothing about Kovacs except what my brother Walt told me. He worshipped Ernie Kovacs. Almost everyone else had forgotten him. The network wiped all his tapes because they needed them for quiz shows, and because he was so far ahead of his time, his memory fell into a sort of parallel universe sinkhole. (Dying in a gruesome car accident in 1964 didn't help.)

I was astonished to find some Hoolihan and Big Chuck things on YouTube a few years ago, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. Big Chuck went on and on for decades hosting the same kind of local late-night show, though at some point his host changed to somebody named Li'l John, a dwarf (and this was before dwarfs were cool!). Now that I look it up again, there are seemingly HUNDREDS of Hoolihan and Big Chuck videos. YouTube is like those paramecia my brother grew in his bedroom, always multiplying, multiplying. Where anyone gets these things is anybody's guess. Did they work at TV stations in the '60s and pilfer them, smuggle them out under their trench coats, only to blow the dust off them to post them on YouTube? 

I recently found out that old commercials and hygiene films and stuff like that is kept in the Prelinger Archives. So maybe there is a Hoolihan Archives somewhere full of Kielbasa Kid episodes, Parma Place soap opera takeoffs, and, of course, Readings by Robert.

Pasta thoughts. Thoughts from the past(a), I mean. And not "paw-stuh" like Amurricans say, no, the PROPER way, which is PAST-a. Of course. 

I've been trying extremely hard to post a little snippet from Hoolihan and Big Chuck called the Six Dollar Man. Very funny, actually, and I may even have posted it a few years ago. Can't gif it because you've got to see the whole thing. So I will past-a it (post-a it, I mean) in the next past-a. Post-a.

You know what I mean.

Hoolihan and Big Chuck opening.

SCTV opening. Compare and contrast.

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Hey Venus!

The following excerpts come from a several-years-old article in National Geographic (link to article below).

So it MUST be true! Since when did National Geographic ever steer us wrong?

In any case, I almost don't care if Venus is really Venus - really looks like that, I mean. The photos are so breathtaking that the illusion (if it IS an illusion) is almost enough. And in any case, she's obviously an illusion that moves, meaning there's no photoshopping going on.

Meantime, there's a Facebook page called Venus the Two Face Cat, which to me sounds a little ungrammatical, as if someone was loudly chewing gum when they set it up. But it's fairly up to date, unlike a lot of these things that are abandoned after the initial enthusiasm dies down.

My first reaction to seeing a photo of Venus was "no way". Then I looked her up on Snopes, and by God, they said "true"! And would Snopes ever steer us wrong?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/chimeracat.asp

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120831-venus-two-faced-cat-genetics-animals-science/


Venus the Two-Faced Cat a Mystery

Famous feline may have different DNA on each side of her body.

By Katia Andreassi, National Geographic News
Venus the two-faced cat is currently the most famous feline on the planet.

The three-year-old tortoiseshell has her own Facebook page and a YouTube video that's been viewed over a million times, and appeared on the Today Show last week. (Watch National Geographic cat videos.)

One look at this cat and you can understand why: One half is solid black with a green eye—the other half has typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye.

How does a cat end up looking like that? Leslie Lyons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the genetics of domestic cats said she's never seen a cat exactly like Venus.

"She is extremely, extremely rare," Lyons said. "But you can explain it and you can understand it."

Many reports about Venus refer to the cat as a "chimera." In mythology, a chimera is a mishmash monster made up of parts of different animals. A feline chimera is a cat whose cells contain two types of DNA, caused when two embryos fuse together.

Among cats, "chimeras are really not all that rare," Lyons said. In fact, most male tortoiseshell cats are chimeras. The distinctively mottled orange and black coat is a sign that the cat has an extra X chromosome.

But female cats, said Lyons, already have two X chromosomes so they can sport that coat without the extra X. That means Venus is not necessarily a chimera.

To find out would require genetic testing, said Lyons. With samples of skin from each side of the cat, "we can do a DNA fingerprint—just like on CSI—and the DNA from one side of the body should be different than the other."

If Venus isn't actually a chimera, then what would explain her amazing face?

"Absolute luck," Lyons said. One theory: perhaps the black coloration was randomly activated in all the cells on one side of her face, while the orange coloration was activated on the other, and the two patches met at the midline of her body as she developed.

Cat fanciers who are transfixed by Venus's split face may be missing the real story: her single blue eye. Cat eyes are typically green or yellow, not blue. (Take a cat quiz.)

A blue-eyed cat is typically a Siamese or else a cat with "a lot of white on them," she explained.

Venus appears to have only a white patch on her chest, which to Lyons is not enough to explain the blue eye.

"She is a bit of a mystery."