Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong. . .

I'm really sorry about this, but some evil seed in me made me post it.

This is what kids' TV was like in the '50s. I have dim memories of Miss Frances, but mostly I remember my older brother making horrible, hilarious fun of her.

She speaks in a dragging voice, repeats everything ad nauseam, and generally acts as if she's facing an audience of drooling subhumans. When I showed a bit of this to my 6-year-old granddaughter (no doubt the target audience back then, though it probably went up to age 10 or 11), her jaw went slack and her eyes glazed over. She looked at me doubtfully and asked, "Was this a real show?"

It does resemble satire, does it not? She must repeat the instructions for her fantastically difficult sandwich 5 or 6 times. "Bread, peanut butter, and. . . what was the other one? You can't remember?" I think this was originally a PBS show. Or something. It makes Captain Kangaroo look like he was shot out of a cannon.

I've seen the sort of thing Caitlin watches: Disney productions such as The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (male duos being inexplicably popular, along with females with special powers: hey, let's give the girls some good role models! Except that they're always princesses). They're snappy, every line a joke, incredibly fast-moving and full of silly, pie-in-the-face gags. They also feature washed-up character actors like John Schuck (the butt of every joke in the show I saw yesterday). There is an invisible line between Tree House (a Canadian preschool channel featuring Max and Ruby, Toopy and Binoo, and Dora the Explorer) and Disney Channel fare, but once you've crossed it, you'll never turn back.

Well, in MY day we did things differently. Until the advent of snappy shows such as Roger Ramjet, Bullwinkle, Underdog, Linus the Lionhearted, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Superchicken, we watched Captain Kangaroo, a show almost as primitive as Miss Frances' lunatic asylum fare. At least there were other characters involved: Mr. Moose; Bunny Rabbit; Grandfather (the clock, who only woke from his slumber if you said, "One, two, three. . . Grandfather!"), and the ubiquitous Mr. Green Jeans. There were little skits, usually ending with a thousand ping-pong balls falling on the Captain, and also little -what were they, anyway? Vignettes? If I could find a video, I'd post it, but most of these shows went out live and disappeared forever.

There'd be a pre-recorded song, with a disembodied pair of hands doing actions, or trains made of construction paper being dragged across a backdrop of green felt. One of them was about Four Little Taxis: "a yellow one, a green one, a blue one, a purple one!" One by one, the cardboard taxis drove away, until there were "no little taxis sitting on the curb. . . no yellow one, no green one. . ." It was heart-wrenching. But then the narrator would lift us out of our despair: "But wait! The taxis are coming back!" That's about as traumatic as the show got.

I only remember fragments, with fuzzy acres of oblivion in between. Binnie, the Magic Bunny. A song about Dallas (obviously, before the Kennedy assassination): "Big D, little-a, double-l-a/Big D, little-a, double-l-a". These soul-deadening little productions were enlivened by Tom Terrific and his pal, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog: cartoons made of line drawings that moved with all the sophistication of a flip-book.

And the crafts! We loved to make fun of the Captain's nasal, Brookly-esque accent as he talked about "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" and making pumpkins out of paper that was "aaaaah-raaaahnge". He used paper fasteners on everything, especially things that were supposed to twirl around. We couldn't even find paper fasteners. They're lame metal things that sort of spread out, and they certainly don't allow for twirling. But sometimes we found a big "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" box in the garage and began to cut windows in it with a steak knife, usually with disastrous results.

OK, so what did all this do to aid the developlent of the average kid-brain in that era? Not much. When the smart-ass cartoons of the mid-to-late '60s came along, they were more than welcome. Beany and Cecil always operated on two levels (like most kids' movies do today), and there were references only the adults would get. Supposedly. When we recently saw a show with a Chinese prince in it, I said, "Hey, maybe that's Prince Chow Mein." Caitlin laughed uproariously, immediately getting a joke that would have sailed over my head in l963. (As a matter of fact, I stole it from Beany and Cecil.)

Kids don't get to choose their entertainment. Some bigwig moguls up at Disney sit around a table, and maybe have focus groups/guinea pigs testing it all out. Is it "better", "worse", or just different? It's fast. Fast-fast-fast, and all sort of run together, so you won't notice there's no story.

Girls are reaching puberty when they're still in the Jolly Jumper these days, and no one knows why. If they weigh 200 pounds, it's genetic and nothing to do with the fact that they live exclusively on sugar and fat (but the Twinkies are fortified with Vitamin C). If they're exposed to Lady Gaga flashing her crotch every 2 seconds, it has no effect. If their parents are so preoccupied with hanging on to their second-rate, fading careers that the kids spend 11 hours a day sexting each other and planning to commit suicide on Skype, hey, that's just life in 2010.

If they're being raised by the TV, well, hey, wasn't I raised by the TV too? I think that explains everything.

*****************************************************

POSTSCRIPT. With my usual ferretlike curiosity, I dug up many more Miss Frances clips, incuding a whole episode in which she takes off her watch to fingerpaint. At the end of these sessions, she'd tell the kiddies to drag their mothers in to listen to her lecture on proper parenting (mothering, back then), while they ran outside to play. This one stressed the need for the children to "rest". They played so hard, Miss Frances claimed, that when they came back in the house, they just played some more and wore themselves right out!

We won't get into the fact that, with rare exceptions, kids weren't fat then because they were outside running their little legs off. In fact, the need to REST seems totally foreign today. "Make sure that the children lie down for a little while on the davenport," she said.

DAVENPORT?? What the hell is that? I had to look it up. I used to think "chesterfield" was out of date.

A white doe

A snow white doe in an emerald glade

To me appeared, with antlers soft of gold,

And leapt two streams, under a laurel's shade,
Near sunrise, in the winter's bitter cold.
To me she appeared wild treasure so fair
I was so distraught my eyes fell to stare,
As if, poor miser pursuing his gold,
I might find relief for grievance of old.
I spied on her neck, "No one dares touch me",
Graven in topaz and diamond stones,
"For Caesar wills I should always run free."
The sun had ascended to zenith, and she
was gone in a flash, lost in its pale gleam.
While I still chased her, I fell in that stream!

Petrarch Sonnet 190

Whoso List to Hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind!
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Thomas Wyatt


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I love all-day suckers: Bessie sings the blues

Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's Bessie Smith! Every line of this is heavily suggestive - particularly the aggressively sexual way she sings it - but it somehow passed the censors, probably because they didn't have enough imagination to know what it meant.

Smith recorded particularly well, because of the clarity and power of her voice, so her records hold up better than most, even the ones from the early '20s.

She had the usual tragic life, died too young, was hit by a car I think. Why, why, why? One could say it's part of the artist's life, but look at Ella. I think Bessie went out of style for a while in the '30s, before making a brief comeback. Went out of style. 'Scuse me while I find a brick wall to run into.

Burl Ives: did he fake his own death?

Last time my husband and I were driving around Utah (having come to see Bryce Canyon, the holiest place in the world, full of glowing gilded cathedrals of God-carved stone), we were suddenly stopped dead in our tracks.
There was a sign up ahead saying, "Tourist Stop: THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN!"

I looked at Bill.

"There's never a Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's a Burl Ives song."

"No, it was based on this mountain here! Let's stop."

He got out and enthusiastically took a picture of a small, ordinary-looking mountain, the farthest thing from rock candy imagineable. We were hungry, and there was a restaurant. As we walked past a nominal gift shop with cheap t-shirts and cellophane bags of rock candy, Bill blinked in surprise, then whispered in my ear.

"There he is."'

"Who?"

"You know! Look over there."

At a table in the corner, facing a beer and a corned beef sandwich, was a heavyset older man with a grey goatee.

"Hm, well, it does look like him, but the truth is - "

"I know it's him."

"See, that's the thing. He's been dead for ten years."

"Maybe he faked his own death."

"Then he'd be 116 years old."

"Well, he looks it, doesn't he?"

He did. But he didn't look much like Burl Ives to me.

When I think of Burl Ives now, I think of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: his surly, snappy, sour performance was one of the best I've seen in a character actor.

But I also thought of other things. I was raised on Burl Ives. One of my first memories was that mild, burly tenor voice of his singing, "Here's a song about a whale, with a most amazing appetite." There was also Holly Jolly Christmas and Little Bitty Tear and a couple other mainstream hits, but they came second to his songs for children, his "Little White Duck" and "The sow took the measles and she died in the spring" (kind of an awful song for the kiddies, probably an old Appalachian thing.) There were some I did myself when I briefly had a kids' TV show in Alberta: "Old witch, old witch, she lives in a ditch, and she combs her hair with a hick'ry switch."

Having never heard it before, the kids loved it.

Anyway, my husband ordered a corned beef sandwich and a beer and kept shooting glances at this Burl Ives stand-in. It occurred to me later (hell, it just occurred to me this second) that they'd hired this local yahoo to stand in and wow the tourists.

Another thing that happened just this second: I looked up the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and found out that it was really just a song, something invented by hoboes. There were approximately seventeen Big Rock Candy Mountains scattered all over the US, each claiming to be THE Big Rock Candy Mountain, bearing big signs and restaurants serving corned beef sandwiches and beer.
Did they all have a Burl Ives lookalike? I really can't say.

Anyway, the video I've posted is haunting. It reminds me structurally of the Child Ballad, I Gave my Love a Cherry, and also evokes Christ's temptation in the wilderness. It's no doubt deeply Appalachian, thus harking back to somewhere in ancient Britain, preserved as only music preserves ancient things.

I have a hankering for another Burl Ives song which seems to be impossible to find. It was on one of his more contemporary albums (meaning, no Child Ballads), and it had songs like Mr. In-Between and Shanghai'd.

Deeply remeniscent of Long Black Veil, it was called That's All I Can Remember. I didn't recall much about it except that it was an execution song, like something out of The Green Mile. It had a couple of lines in it that stuck in my head like barbed wire: "And the wheels in my head started turnin'. . .and they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. " If this man was looking back on his own execution, it surely wasn't from Paradise.

I dug around, and dug around, and couldn't find a recorded version anywhere (though supposedly it was also recorded by Lefty Frizzell. Who the fuck is that?). But I found a fragmentary, scrambled-up lyric, which I'll try to reconstruct here. Since there is more than one version, there's some repetition of lines. I fought and fought and fought to have consistent line-spacing, and my computer just wouldn't let me do it, but since nobody reads this anyway. . .
I've never killed anyone, but I do identify with this fellow's loneliness.

That's All I Can Remember
Come listen while I tell you 'bout a man that's gonna die
Be patient with me won't you please, if I should start to cry
Maybe one of you can understand my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

I'm lookin' up from somewhere below
The atmosphere is warm and they've got plenty of coal
Maybe someone above can hear my story
How a fool lost his soul for a moment of glory
(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

Now Bill was my friend, throughout my short-lived life
'Til I caught him out with Mary, my wife
Then the wheels in my head started turnin'
A death plan I made up for both of those concernin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

They took me to prison and they locked me in a cell
They gave me my last big meal then strapped me to a chair
Then my life before my eyes came returnin'
Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'

(And that's all, that's all, that's all
That's all that I can remember)

There's another verse in there, about how he killed Bill and Mary, a very lurid one, but I can't find it anywhere. I can't find the composer and lyricist of the song. In fact, I barely found it at all.

But it stuck in my head, which is how songs are transported or propelled forward. It happened even before anything was written down. Most of the people who sang and remembered them couldn't read or write anyway. People from Appalachia who sang those twangy, multi-versed songs with tunes that all had similar intervals, and even told similar stories. Unlike the kid from Deliverance, most couldn't play very well, and just strummed one chord on the banjo, bom-jigga, bom-jigga, bom.

Everything went around in a circle then, and everyone was everyone's cousin. How many broke away? Some must have. But mostly, the musicologists had to go after them, first with pen and ink, then gramophones, then more sophisticated equipment.

If you want a repository of those songs, go listen to Joan Baez' first album. I can hardly stand it now, her voice is so bleak, so wintry, so devoid of youth or joy. My brother used to sing songs about someone named Geordie, put to death for poaching "the King's royal deer". I used to think they were being cooked, like eggs. My sister sang "Go 'way from window" and other cheery ditties (one of them called Poor Old Horse: "the dogs will eat my rotten flesh, and that's how I'll decay"). But then, my sister was bitter and emotionally deformed, even in her twenties. She was weird, holding the guitar between her legs like a cello, and having a new boy friend every six months.

How did I get on to all this? Burl Ives didn't really have a very good voice, but then, neither did Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan. Charisma, they had, and an understanding of the underpinnings, the deep traditions of music. They were building on something. There wasn't an internet then, but songs were a repository, not necessarily of history, but of things that happened all the time. Not factual, but nevertheless true.

POSTSCRIPT. I just listened to this song again, and I take it back, what I said about Ives' voice. It vibrates like Waterford crystal, sounds like nothing else, and defies all analysis.

And the song! Listen to it one more time. It's clearly Appalachian, probably a Child Ballad from antiquity, with that plainspun tune and spooky medieval intervals. But what grabs me is that he plays just two chords. Two. There used to be a joke that if you could stand up and play three chords, you were a folk singer, but this trumps even that standard for minimalism. Pick-twang, pick-twang, pick-twang: not even full chords, but maybe three strings. And he tells this incredible story, this question and answer. Why nine questions? The Trinity/three wishes, times three, making it three times more powerful? Nine-ty-nine-and-nine-teeeeee. Three nines. But flip those three nines over, and you have. . .
The devil's number.

POST-POST-SCRIPT. I guess I can't count. There are only eight questions. So what is the ninth: whether he's "God's or mine"?

Was this thing made of chewing gum?

Well folks, I don't have much that's new to say today except that thank GOD the heat has lifted. I turn into a melted Creamsicle at these times, and all I want to do is knit and eat potato chips. Even going to the frigid mall is hard on the body, as my body core doesn't cool off for a long time and doesn't take well to the assault of a sudden chill. Also I can't walk off all the calories and feel fat as a P. I. G.

So anyway, in my clicking around, I found a highly unusual color video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse of 1940. This is footage that doesn't appear in most of the other videos, taken from different angles. It also includes much more of the "sea monster" humping up and down that was common on the bridge before it began to twist like a pretzel. The public was assured this was "safe" and normal, which was totally bizarre. With the internal damage from all the heaving, the thing could have buckled at rush hour (if they had such a thing then) and killed who knows how many people.

Though it lacks the hokey and un-helpful narration of the other videos ("There it goes!"), it has an eerie sound track which seems authentic, though there is some doubt that anyone used sound film then. From eyewitness accounts, the failure of the bridge was deafening, with loud screeching and roaring that went on for hours.

Truly fascinating.

First Automobile: 1886 Benz

In my car-car post of a couple of days ago, I got onto the subject of the first car. Since so many people were working on it at the same time, and probably stealing each other's ideas left and right, it's hard to say exactly who won the title of First Car Ever.

But I have to say, this one takes the cake for originality. I especially love that coffee pot at the back: you don't even have to stop at 'Bucks! It makes a satisfying "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" sound, and is so slow it doesn't scare the horses.

BOOM!

Ye gods, this looks terrible! Who knows if it will run. It looks worse than the National Film Board personal hygiene movies (which my teacher called "fillums") we watched in the basement of McKeough School in Chatham. It looks worse than the nature films they showed in the rec room at Bondi when it rained in the summer. It looks worse than anything. But if it plays, it'll blow yuz away! It's so goldern funny.

The Three Ages of Man: Car; Car;Car . . .

I was going to call this post "and we'll have fun, fun, fun. . . "

On the weekend, I went to my very first Car Show. I have no interest in cars whatsoever, except that once every few years, I stumble upon an antique car that literally takes my breath away. The last time it happened, it was a burgundy-and-cream Mercury Westergard from about 1940, one of those massive, bulbous cars with a sloping back and rear tires that barely showed. For some reason this automobile stopped me in my tracks.

Hoping for a similar find, I trudged through what seemed like miles of people's most cherished babies. Old guys had worked on these for years (and maybe a few young guys with tattoos and no job). It showed. Only a few came from pre-war times, and most had been souped up or otherwise tinkered with, the running boards removed, the engines jutting out unnaturally like tumors. This was too bad, because I love Harold Lloyd cars most of all.

So I was obsessed with a search for that 1940 Mercury, hoping it was owned by a local. I didn't find it, but 3/4 of the way through our hot trudge on a sultry August afternoon, I was stopped in my tracks.

I didn't know what it was, but it was stunning, the ultimate in beauty and grace, all wetly gleaming in chrome, cherry red and pristine white.

"It's a 1961 Corvette," my husband said. (He didn't need those little white cards behind the windshields to tell him the make and year of a car. Ever. In fact, he identified a few that were so exotic, it made my head spin.)

People sigh and drool over antique Corvettes. Now I know why. It looked kind of like a skin you'd slide into, erotic. There was no back seat. (The few '20s cars I saw had boxy carriage-like interiors, with roomy, plush, sloping back seats that seemed specifically designed for sex. They also had rumble seats in the back, completely separate and open to the elements, a perfect place to stash your mother-in-law. People were ingenious in those days.)

I don't know why this car held me transfixed. I'd post a picture of it, but I can't decide which one brings more tears to my eyes. Anyway, it led me to my usual wild goose chase for information, this time on the History of the Automobile.

If you ask people who invented the car, 95% of them will say, "Henry Ford." According to that impeccable source, Wikipedia, Ford came around about 200 years after the first experimental prototypes. These were wheezy little things with sewing machine engines, some even driven by steam. (This is why one of the above models has that Jiffy Pop thing attached to it, likely blowing the car along with hot air.)

Inventors were thinking in terms of "horseless carriages" for a long time, so wheels were huge and spoked, with hard rubber tires. About a thousand different people were working on the design, so I can't name any of them because it would be so incredibly boring.

I can't get this to cut and paste, but it's too good to leave out, so I'll transcribe it by hand (while trying to eat my peanut butter toast and drink Crystal Lite iced tea):

"By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the road in Camborne. Such vehicles were in vogue for a time, and over the next decades such innovations as hand brakes, multi-speed transmissions, and better steering developed. Some were commercially successful in providing mass transit, until a backlash against these large speedy vehicles resulted in passing a law, the Locomotive Act, in 1865 requiring self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This effectively killed road auto development in the UK for most of the rest of the 19th century, as inventors and engineers shifted their efforts to improvements in railway locomotives. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878."

(Why is it that I can hear John Cleese saying, "And now for something completely different"?)

Anyway, enough of this fishy-sounding, probably concocted history written by a bunch of unemployed geeks who live on beer and Pringles. The process of developing the modern automobile was kind of like a steel mill where iron is melted down in a big blast furnace and spat out as ingots. Everybody poured something into the mix. Everyone stole from everyone else. Gradually, something cohered, solidified and emerged.

One of the first designers, back in about 1800, was named Benz. The names Daimler and Diesel came up as well. These were men, not things. This seems incredible to me, but there it is. Anyway, when the internal combustion engine was finally perfected somewhere around 1910, it was hailed as the greatest invention in the history of mankind.

No more horse dung! No more horses, period, except for the fast set who could afford polo ponies. Apart from the wheezy, rickety noises and familiar explosions, the car was deemed marvelous, and eventually, nearly everyone embraced it as a universally Good Thing.

Right. Until it began to poison the air and water to such a degree that our future survival is now very dicey indeed.

We're married to our cars. We conceive our children in them, we shine and wax them tenderly, and (especially) covet the ones we want and can't have. Some people's lives literally revolve around them. I couldn't give a shit, except when I see something like that sublime cherry-and-white '61 'Vette.

Oh OK, I'll try to find a picture already. I wanted to marry it, it was so beautiful. It exuded effortless grace and genius in design like few other material objects I've seen.

Maybe in another five years I'll see another one. Or not? I kind of wish they'd all go away. I'd have the horse shit back in a heartbeat.

Jesus, that's funny!

This is the way my mind works, when it works at all.

I started watching a six-hour documentary about Monty Python. SIX hours. I couldn't believe I was sitting through it all, and at several points was going to ditch it for Dateline or Hoarders or something esoteric like that.

These guys just look so bloody old now, and one of them is dead. John Cleese is unrecognizable, as if he belongs in a home. Eric Idle looks like George Harrison if George Harrison had lived to be 100, Michael Palin and Terry Jones still look alike, ha ha ha. They gabbed and they gabbed like tiresome old men, which they are. There were a few welcome clips, but mostly it was people blathering on and on and on about what their favorite "bit" was. Half of them I didn't even know, but I guess their opinion mattered, or they were cool or something.

They all liked stuff like the parrot sketch, Lumberjack Song, fish slapping dance and Upper Class Twit of the Year. The ones everybody likes. Why was this show even made? Why wasn't it edited down to a nice pithy hour and a half?

I liked the one about the fatal joke, but it wasn't just a sketch, it was a whole episode that brought in World War II (the group was obsessed with World War II) and Hitler with funny subtitles:

Hitler: I cut my dog's nose off.

Crowd: How does he smell?

Hitler: Terrible!

Mostly the six-hour endurance test made me realize how much time had passed, and how uneven the several Python movies were. There were some really disgusting passages I'd forgotten about, such as the Holy Grail scene where Sir Whatsisname got his arms and legs chopped off and was hopping around gushing blood. Blecccch. The Meaning of Life was the worst, though, with someone's liver being carved out, and then that scene with the fat man exploding, just about the worst thing I've ever seen.

But I did like Life of Brian. I thought Life of Brian was profound, and at times bordered on the reverent. I don't think they were dissing Jesus so much as dissing all the pompous assholes who pretend to know what he was about (if he existed at all: might he have been just the distillation of all our most aching desires?).

That got me going on a post I did on a former blog, the blog where I was chased out of town. It was all about drawings and paintings depicting the Laughing Jesus. There are dozens of them, seemingly, all along the same lines, as if the artists traced them.

Then I started wondering about St. Margaret and the Dragon. When I looked up St. Margaret, there were about 14 of them, so I got discouraged and quit.

Eric Idle still goes around milking Python with a show called Spamalot, though the rest of them don't seem to mind (maybe he bought them out). He must be a fucking millionaire by now, so this must be an attempt to recapture his glory days.

I think Graham Chapman had the right idea.

Tacoma Narrows Newsreel with audio

There are so many good videos of the Tacoma Narrows disaster that it was hard to choose. There must have been more than one person filming it, as you can see it from so many different angles. This one is called a newsreel, but seems too long for that. Still, it wins points for the histrionic narration ("There it goes!") and the music, which seems to have been lifted from a bad Western.

It's fascinating when a human project fails this dramatically! Poor Tubby.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

A bridge made of tacos

http:www.wsdot.wa.gov/tnbhistory/default.htm

Gather 'round, all ye children, and listen to my tale. Collapsing bridge stories have always intrigued me. Here you have structures that are carefully designed and built, gazillions of dollars spent. Only in rare cases do the builders cut corners. But wait 'til you hear about this one.


I became fascinated with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. Galloping Gertie, about ten years ago. I did all sorts of research on the net, then forgot all about it and deleted all my links. Enough of that, I said, and went on to something else.


I don't know what brought it back. Looking for something to blog about besides my limp, depressed, tail-end-of-summer mood, maybe. Rather than go back over all that shit from ten years ago, I'm a-gonna tell you all about MY version of Galloping Gertie.
This was the late '30s, and nobody had any money because World War II hadn't properly started yet. At this point, Hitler looked like a swell guy who was just getting rid of the riff-raff.

But the folks in Tacoma, Washington needed a new bridge. The proposed model, a nice conservative squatty indestructible thing, looked like a safe deal. Then someone else stepped up to the plate: Elmer Fartsworthy (not his real name: I'm protecting his estate), who had this sleek new design for a modern bridge, an elegant bridge, a Bridge of the Future.

This thing used about half the materials of the other one, a real advantage during the Depression. It was something like 12 feet wide - OK, I exaggerate. Maybe 13. A long, thin ribbon of a bridge that Fartsworthy assured everyone would do the job, and look modern and bragworthy in the bargain: great for civic pride, the envy of two-bit towns everywhere.

Since Mr. F. had a hand in designing San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, everyone felt very enthusiastic. They were even more enthusiastic when F. said he could build his structure for $6 million, not the $11 million of the original. This six million dollar bridge was looking better all the time.

A funny thing, though - as they built it, the workers kept saying, "Hey. Is that supposed to happen?" The bridge kept swaying, even before it was completed. It kind of went side to side. The architect assured them this was only a standard lateral flexo-torsion with a side of fries, so they kept on with it. But the workers were so nauseated from motion sickness, they had to suck lemons to keep from throwing up.

When it opened with great fanfare in 1940, the thing was heaving up and down like a seasick sea serpent, but people soon flocked to Tacoma to take the wild ride. Galloping Gertie was so unstable that the car in front of you would literally sink and disappear. Never mind, said the designers and engineers. It would hold. This was just a normal variation of the flexor chattahoozus. The beast had more torque than any goddamn Golden Gate pussy bridge. It might whip back and forth like a double-Dutch skipping rope, but this only made the drive more interesting.

Until.

Until, one day, only a couple of months later, the wind began to blow.

There was no traffic on the bridge that morning. Just a car with a dog in it, mysteriously parked. The dog's name was Tubby. You have to know this, because it's the most important part of the story.

The bridge began to, well, not sway exactly, but flap back and forth like a bleeping pancake. It was heaving 30 feet in the air, first on one side, then the other, with a bizarre still point in the middle.

All over the world, architects and engineers had the same nightmare.

Violently it flew up and down, pitching and bucking. The guy who owned the car/dog actually walked down the middle of this thing, trusting soul, but his terrified dog practically bit his hand off. There is archival footage of him running his ass off to get away.

The seasick sea serpent continued to heave up and down in the most nauseous fashion, making a hideous shrieking sound that made bystanders plug their ears. At one point it looked like it might stop, but another gust of wind got it going even more violently.

Finally, the inevitable: one rivet flew out. Then a strip of metal sheared off. Then another. Wires snapped like spaghetti. With a deafening roar, the entire middle section of the bridge crumbled into the water like an overdone piece of toast. A moment later, another span groaned and gave way.

The thing just snapped like a bundle of twigs. I wonder what the designer was feeling, watching all this: how could this happen? Where did I go wrong? How soon can I get out of town?

Tubby didn't make it, but he was the only casuality. If this had happened at rush hour, who knows what the death toll would have been.

Supposedly, the disaster (still being dissected by engineers 70 years later, though not the same ones - maybe their great-grandchildren) would have happened even without the bargain basement price of the thing. Some said the bridge would not allow wind to pass through the sides, pushing it around like somebody blowing on one of them pinwheel things. Others said it was sexually aroused by a first cousin of the Loch Ness Monster which had taken up residence in Puget Sound, and was shimmying in a kind of frantic mating dance.

Others said it was just an atypical aeroflexomotor screw-up, with shi-fa-fa on the side. There followed a storm of accusations and counter-accusations, denial of all wrongdoing, exposure of corruption, and all that sort of thing.

An inspector who had been hired to make a safety assessment of the bridge before it opened had issued a severe warning that it would inevitably fail, but because the bridge was more popular than Seabiscuit, City Hall opened it anyway. After the failure, this same guy immediately had his ass fired for embarrassing everyone. No good deed goes unpunished.

I like this story. I like weird, atypical things happening, and mighty structures collapsing. I like the fact that there's lots of video (someone had the presence of mind to grab a camera and get some very tasty shots). Maybe it's my sense of anarchy.

But I do feel bad about the dog.

Let me count the ways. . .

How many ways can y'all say, "Your ass is sittin' on pomut, kopos, bumbac, bavina, algedon, namyk, pamuk, bawelna, or just plain x#%xx*@@&&+{:->}"???

Have we devolved?

A friend of mine recently wrote that he suffers from back pain. Since we can't get Ben Gay any more (or can we? Is it just going by a different handle, like Queer Shmear?), he has had good results with a sort of back-stretching device that decompresses the spine.

OK then, why are our spines so collapsed to begin with? Can you guess? Sapient types (those with degrees on their degrees) have stated that we were never meant to walk upright. If we were still dragging our knuckles, we wouldn't all be lumbar-ing along.

Interesting theory, but I don't think we're going to try it any time soon.

Not every ache is caused by the australopithicine hunch over the keyboard. Spines are complicated and age along with the rest of us. The forces of gravity really do compress discs and cause them to grind together, sometimes with considerable agony.

But the picture of human devolution (above) isn't entirely funny. We now walk on two legs, but how often do we bother? An alarming number of people literally sit all day, only getting up to pee or grab a Danish.

Having your spine curved like a wishbone can't be healthy, and how many of us remember to sit up straight when we blog and tweet and twitch and twit and twat (sorry for that last one)?

And then there's obesity. I heard an alarming statistic the other day: girls are now reaching puberty as young as SEVEN. 43% of black girls (more prone to early puberty: I'm not being racist) have developed breasts by age 8.

Eating chicken pumped full of growth hormone may be a factor, as well as being bombarded by messages to grow up faster, faster, faster, become sexualized sooner, and have your own charge card by Grade 2 so you can dress like Lady Gaga.

But the main reason girls are experiencing this bizarre, unnatural phenomenon for the first time in human history is that they are too damn fat. Excess body fat pumps up the estrogen, and the body can't help but respond.

This means our daughters will soon be able to get pregnant at ten.

In spite of our awareness that fatness curves the spine and bloats the breasts, we carry on eating. I constantly see articles on the addictive quality of junk food and its effect on the brain. In a world ripped apart by stress and uncertainty, a world where financial and natural disaster vie with each other for the capacity to completely demoralize us, it's handy to grab a drug, a really cheap and readily available drug, and just stuff it in your mouth.

I won't get into Morgan Spurlock and his documentary, EAT ME (actually it was Supersize Me, reflecting the 30-lb. weight gain he experienced from a month of eating nothing but McDonald's). That was an extreme, wasn't it? Then why do I keep seeing items on 20-20, Dateline and other programs I never watch, depicting enormous 10-year-olds lumbering around at fat camp, the boys sporting breasts bigger than the girls'?

If kids are this fat at 8 or 10, if girls are having menstrual periods when they should be playing with Play-Doh and Care Bears, something is seriously wrong, isn't it? How does all this relate to back pain? It does, and it doesn't. Not everyone whose back hurts is obese. But many, many people are carrying a crushing load, leading to heart disease, high blood pressure, type II diabetes and general emotional angst.

It may not be politically correct to say so, but fat doesn't look good on people. If it were evenly distributed, well, maybe. But it isn't. It congregates in big rolls and sticks out through clothing, which never fits quite right because everyone's fat settles in a different place. It renders the body lumpy and unattractive. It bounces and jiggles. And it definitely plays hell with our health.

I saw another astonishing item on the TV news: surely this must have been wrong! It was all about the by-now-well-known fact that belly fat, fat around the middle of the body, is more hazardous than in other places (such as a big fat head, or fat elbows).

But that's not what shocked me. A doctor set out the limits of health: the maximum waist size for men should be 46", and for women, 42".

Forty-Two Fucking Inches?????

I don't think my waist was that big at nine months pregnant. I am far from a skinny person, but my waist measurement is 28". Is this the allowance we make for the obesity rate in North America? Do people strive to get "down to" 42" or 46"? What were they orginally, 74"?

Society is still obsessed with thinness and fitness. Just look at all the useless exercise gadgets that promise 50 lbs. of weight loss in a month (with just 15 minutes of exercise, 3 times a week!). At the same time, there is a parallel march towards early death: these fat kids who can't seem to stay out of the candy aisle are going to be twice as fat in adulthood, aren't they? What's going to happen to adults who developed arterial plaque at 10?

I'm in a rotten mood, that's what. Natural disasters all over the world all seem to be caused by global warming. We've done this to ourselves. Instead of being a sleek, modern computer society, we're turning into blobs that can be rolled down the street. Why does the human race hate itself so much? Why this lack of discipline? Why do "experts" insist this is all genetic, when these mysterious genes never showed themselves until now? That's like inheriting blue eyes at 42.

I just get this awful fall-of-Rome feeling. Fin de siecle, or whatever. We used to fear plagues, but these have disappeared from the headlines, as passe as Legionnaire's disease. I know the human race likes to preach doom and gloom - it sells more products, especially self-help books that help you eat, pray, and lose 50 pounds in Bali with a gorgeous man.

But I wonder what kind of world I am leaving for my grandchildren. Have we devolved this dramatically? Has short-term greed pretty much doomed us? Are all those horrific SF movies really true: has the fabric of civilization started to seriously come apart?

So here I sit, hunched over my computer (actually, I'm trying to sit up straight, but it probably won't last), contemplating the extremes of a society that I must belong to, because I have no other choice. I wonder what contribution I have to make. I am selfish, which means I'm not willing to go overseas and help flood victims. I would soon be overwhelmed.

I can love my grandchildren, try to even out and average the violent highs and lows of being a kid in 2010, so that they have some sense of stability.

As a lapsed churchgoer, I'm surprised this passage from Isaiah leaped into my head:

"Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain."

But what else?

They're not fat. At least it's a start.

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This has to rate as the strangest cartoon I've ever seen. What were these guys smoking?

Was Ernie Kovacs murdered?

DEATH IN SIX TAKES

Ernie is driving his Corvair station wagon at blinding speed along Santa Monica Boulevard, an unfamiliar route. He has just come from a Hollywood party full of celebrities, at which he was collossally bored. It is teeming down rain, pitch black, and the Corvair is fishtailing, hard to control. He has had four stiff drinks and feels slightly tipsy. Then he realizes he has left his cigars at home, unthinkable, and has nothing with which to obliterate his thoughts. $200,000.00 in debt from poker and gin games, which he played badly. The IRS on his tail for an astronomical sum of back taxes. Several days before, he was overheard to say, “I’m worth more dead than alive.” Almost absently, he lets go of the wheel, just to see what will happen.

Suddenly the car skids and spins, Ernie grabs the wheel and tries to steer madly, but it is too late: a split-second later, it slams full-force into a utility pole.

Take One:

Ernie dies instantly, on impact. Police find him hours later, thrown partly out of the passenger side. His left hand is outstretched towards an unlit Havana cigar. Cause of death: fractured skull and ruptured aorta.

Take Two:

Ernie does not die. After the sickening noise of the crash, he is somehow aware and awake, with the weird clarity that often follows massive trauma. He reaches over to open the passenger door and begins to crawl out. “Edie,” he says. He can’t die. Edie will be left with the mess. A few seconds later, he blacks out.

Take Three:

Ernie does not die. He begins to crawl out the passenger door, but an astounding blow of impossibly powerful pain brings him down as his brain begins to haemorrhage and his heart explodes.

Take Four:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. Even the most hardened cop feels tearful and sick. A jackal reporter takes a macabre photo of the dead body, and next day it appears on the cover of every tabloid in Hollywood.

Take Five:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. “What are we gonna. . . “ “I don’t know. Maybe. . . “ “How ‘bout we say he was trying to light a cigar.” “Anybody got one?” “Here.” “This isn’t the right kind.” “It won’t matter anyway, a cigar’s a cigar.”

Take Six:

Another reporter arrives, but Ernie’s body is already gone. He takes out a large Havana cigar, and though they make him sick, he smokes half of it. He stubs it out, places it on the pavement, and takes a picture of it. The photo will appear on the cover of every newspaper in Hollywood.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) [II/IX]

An Ethiopian in the fuel supply

I don’t know what got me onto this. My Dad used to sit at the dinner table, soused, and monologue by the hour. As his captive audience, we were expected to listen. If we didn’t, we risked his wrath.

We listened.

He kept talking about a comedian from the 1930s, his favourite, who spoke in a nasal drawl and made the English language do back-flips and double-twists. He was constantly hooking his top hat on his cane behind his head. He juggled. He had some negative traits that my Dad loved, and was known to mutter, “Can’t stand kids and dogs.”

Along with maxims like “never give a sucker an even break” and “you can’t cheat an honest man,” his legend included bizarre pool routines (in which the cue somehow ended up twisted like a corkscrew) and card games where he held five aces. But most of all, this man drank. And drank. Until at age 68, heart, liver, lungs and even mind gave way, and he died of rampant alcoholism.

W. C. Fields had a Dickensian childhood, which was perhaps why he was so superb at playing Wilkins Micawber in the movie version of David Copperfield. (I saw this just the other day on TCN. The potential for semi-dramatic acting in this role was almost heartbreaking. He could have been so much more than a crabby old drunk who knew how to juggle.) Fields ran away from his drunken lout of a father (do drunken louts run in families, I wonder?) at age eleven. Cadged his way through the slums of Philadelphia like the Artful Dodger, until one day when he attended a sleazy circus and saw someone throw so many balls in the air – and catch them – that they blurred together.

So the lad started practicing. First with two lemons, probably stolen. Then other fruits (casaba melons? Let’s not get too literal here). He would balance a large stick (like a pool cue) on the end of his toe, toss it up in the air, and attempt to catch it on his toe, raking his shins open in the process.

Oh all right, let’s skip all this garbage and go on to his spectacular career as a master juggler at the Ziegfeld Follies, where someone “discovered” him for the movies. His silents weren’t much, just displays of dexterity and tomfoolery. But in his first talkie, audiences sat up. No one had ever spoken like that before, and never would again.

Fields kept a mistress for fourteen years, one Carlotta Monti, a “dusky beauty” (in his words) whom he nicknamed Chinamen for her vivid style of dress. He was constantly derailing her infant career as a singer and actress, foreshadowing I Love Lucy by decades. Monti was as dependent on Fields as he was on her, but for different reasons.

She left behind a ghostwritten memoir which has no sense of her voice, but which is packed with anecdotes, some of which might even be true. This was later made into a movie with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine called W. C. Fields and Me.

I can only serve up a slice of Monti, before sharing my own rather eccentric Best of Fields list.:

“Woody (her name for him: rhymes with ‘moody’) didn’t drive too many women to distraction, but among those he did were the script girls – through his ad libbing. The script for one scene in Poppy called for him to say, ‘I will now play the Moonlight Sonata.’ It was a simple line, but, instead of delivering it, he mumbled, ‘I will now render the allegro movement from the Duggi Jig Schreckensnack opera of Gilka Kimmel, an opus Piptitone.’

The script girl gasped, and asked how to spell the words. Sutherland (the director) wanted an interpretation. Woody shrugged, and admitted, ‘I don’t know myself what it means. To tell you the truth, it just popped out. But leave it in, Eddie, it’s got a nice lilt to it.”

Eddie left it in.”

This man practiced a form of spontaneous, convoluted verbal jazz, almost impossible to reproduce here. One of the first Fields movies I ever saw was a little-known classic called Mississippi, ostensibly starring a very young Bing Crosby in magnificent voice. But Fields, as the riverboat captain, easily stole every scene he was in.

The movie not only included one of his best card game scenes ever (including the astonishing statement “the man who holds the first four aces wins”), but featured rambling, probably mostly improvised reminiscences about his youth as a dauntless Indian fighter.

“Grabbing my bowie knife, I cut a path through a solid wall of human flesh. . . dragging my canoe behind me!” In another version, he has “my canoe under one arm and a Rocky Mountain goat under the other.” By the end of the movie he’s scared to death by a cigar store Indian, and quickly recants: “I would no more think of harming a hair on a redskin’s head than sticking a fork in my mother’s back.”

My other favorite, which I watched on late-night TV in 1965, was The Big Broadcast of 1938, one of a series of mediocre, wildly popular “Big Broadcast” films. There was something of a Fields revival going on then, and I saw most of the better-known ones like The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee (in which he and Mae West outdrawled each other). But there was something that grabbed me about this movie, in which Bob Hope played his first starring role as an insecure host on a cruise ship. Just witnessing Bob Hope fumble and fail, all his lame jokes falling flat, was gratifying enough, but he also sang Thanks for the Memory (NOT “memories”) with the delightful Shirley Ross (NOT DorothyLamour, who played one of his several ex-wives).

But Fields, oh, Fields! Before he lands on the deck of the ship in a flying golf cart, he plays a round in which the ball behaves like one of his juggled objects. When he pours sand out of his golf shoe at the end of the scene, various objects like live frogs drop out (“Hmmmm, so that's what happened to that tongue sandwich”). It’s the humming and muttering and fiddling and “drat”s and "Godfrey Daniels" that make this scene, and I swear I can’t begin to reproduce them. Then, delight of delights, he does his infamous poolroom scene, once again dominating a picture which has such dismal clangers as a performance of Wagner by Nazi sympathizer Kierstan Flagstad (wearing horns and a breastplate and brandishing a spear), and an awful love song called Don’t Tell a Secret to a Rose by a clearly-gay non-Latino called Tito Guizarre.

My brother, who was drunk at the time, came in halfway through the movie and we guffawed through the rest of it. I recorded the soundtrack on our old Webcor reel-to-reel with the five-pound microphone, and listened to it endlessly. I had become a Fields fan for life.

Then I promptly forgot all about him.

I started to think he was kind of offputting, which he was. I had read a couple of biographies, and his self-destructive drinking and the horrifying collapse of his once-athletic body at the end of his life was beyond disturbing. His “friends” sneaked alcohol into the sanitarium as he lay dying, hallucinating that vultures were coming to get him. Carlotta Monti, aware that the sound of rain was one of the only things that helped him sleep, stood outside his room with a hose and kept up a continual light patter on the roof.

So he died, passed into legend, and – what? What got me onto this bizarre topic? One day I tried to get a DVD of Mississippi, and found that it had disappeared. It was never shown on TV, perhaps due to cringe-inducing black stereotypes. After much sleuthing, I found a crummy bootleg copy on eBay. Someone must have held a movie camera in front of a TV or something. But it was barely watchable, and I began to understand my fascination.

This tough, lonely, cynical, oversensitive, supremely gifted man, this curmudgeon whose friends didn’t understand him but still loved him lavishly, was one of a kind. No one could have invented him: he would have been completely implausible. But my favourite thing about Fields is this: in Robert Lewis Taylor’s early Fields bio, he tells this heartwarming story.

“Many supporters of Chaplin have long resented Fields’ notoriety. Perhaps the best testimonial to Chaplin’s greatness is the fact that Fields was incapable of watching him perform for more than a few minutes. The virtuosity of the little fellow’s pantomime caused Fields to suffer horribly. One evening, a few years before Fields’ death, he was persuaded to attend a showing of early Chaplin two-reelers. At a point in the action where Chaplin suffocated a 300-pound villain by pulling a gas street lamp down over his head, the laughter rose in deafening crescendo, and Fields was heard to cough desperately.

‘Hot in here,’ he muttered to his companion, who was fortified against the cooling system with a heavy tweed jacket. ‘I need air.’ Fields left the theatre and waited outside in his Lincoln. Later, asked what he thought of Chaplin’s work, he said, ‘The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer.’

‘He’s pretty funny, don’t you think?’ his companion went on doggedly.

‘He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived,’ said Fields, ‘and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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But the greatest of these. . .

When 17-year-old Tory Inglis went to New Westminster's first Pride celebration last June, she was pretty excited about it.

It's not easy being a gay teenager. In spite of all the huge strides we've supposedly made in the realm of "tolerance" (and what does it mean when I "tolerate" you? It's a pretty stingy word), prejudice and even outright contempt lurk in hidden and not-so-hidden places. But Tory really wanted to go. An event such as this, vibrant and joyful, would boost the spirits of any young person who sometimes feels marginalized by who she is.

Tori's picture in the Vancouver Province newspaper reveals a shy-looking, serious young woman in dark-framed glasses, a girl who never thought she'd get into such dire trouble just for going to a parade. She hardly looks like a foaming radical, but rather someone who's quietly but fervently seeking authenticity in a world full of posturing.

Yes, Tory went to the Pride parade, and while she was there, someone snapped a picture of her with (the story says) "two gay men". And that would have been that, except for another truth about Tory: she has been a lifelong, active member of First Presbyterian Church, baptised and confirmed.

When the photo came out in the June 12 edition of the Royal City Record, it didn't just cause a stir.

It caused a storm.

There must have been much buzzing about this before Tory was called into the principal's office (so to speak). It was about a month after the photo appeared in the local paper that she was told to meet with the minister "and a female member of the church" (a buffer? The article doesn't say).

The response was predictable. Basically, Tory had her hand slapped. But it was worse than that. She was scolded for being a bad role model, for "promoting a sexual lifestyle".

She knew that, like most denominations, her church was against gay marriage, but she never expected to be told to step down as a junior youth leader. Tory sat and quietly wept during the disciplinary hearing (for that's what it was). Perhaps her tormentors felt this was a good thing, a sign of repentance.

The Province article states, "The minister told her the church would prefer if she withdraw from the group that organized the Pride events. But she refused and withdrew her membership from the church instead."

I have been through something like this in my own church, not over my sexual orientation but for my profound, disturbing doubts about leadership and the agenda we were expected to follow, especially in light of the fact that "our" church (unlike everyone else) claims to be gay-friendly and "even" ordains openly gay ministers, so long as they don't practice it beyond the bonds of monogamy.

Keep it quiet, boys and girls. No Pride parade photos, OK? If a United Church minister appeared on one of those floats, what would happen? Can you guess?

And dare I even mention the possibility that a minister might be furthering his own agenda, his need for public recognition: that he might have "issues" that he can only work out in front of the cameras on national television? Worse than that: why didn't anyone object to having these cameras filming the worship service, and why can't I even talk to anyone about it? And how about this: why is it OK and even "courageous" for him to do this, and not OK for Tory to be photographed at a parade?

"I see a lot of shallowness," a friend of mine said years ago. I have never seen such commitment and passion in a human being, but organized religion slowly and systematically snuffed it out.

Tory has fortunately received supportive calls from other church members, but the elders are adamant that she sinned in some fundamental way. Her mother commented, "I never thought they'd say she's not a good role model, because she is, and we've raised her to be that way. Our belief is that God created us to be who we are, and I've raised her to be true to who she is."

Imagine that. Another sinner! God created lesbians and gays? What sort of heresy is this?

What would Jesus say? Well. . . he didn't say anything at all about homosexuality, in spite of the fact that fundamentalists like to twist the gospel into something resembling a pretzel. As for marriage, he was sort of against it, telling people it might be better if they were celibate, though acknowledging that most people couldn't manage it.

If I may indulge in duelling Bible quotes, here's a pretty good one from 1st Corinthians: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." - J. Christ.

In being true to herself, Tory was forced to step down from a lifelong, cherished commitment. I can say to you now that this is about as painful as losing an arm. When you sever ties like that, you leave a huge chunk of yourself behind.

But if she stayed on, what would be the consequences? Whispered conversations, quickly hushed when she appears? Judgemental glances? Threats to leave if she stays?

One of the organizers of the Royal City Pride Society describes Tory as "intelligent, quiet and shy". Hardly the tattooed, pierced, raging radical we sometimes see on the news. This young woman quietly made a life-changing decision, choosing authenticity over phoniness, reality over posturing.

And she paid the price.

Tory made an incredible statement that made the hair on my arms stand up: "Above all, I want to promote peace and love and acceptance. And in a place that condemns people for loving, I would much rather be in a place that accepts people for who they are."

Heresy! Floats, drag queens, marching bands. People so "out" they're in your face. How dare she, a Christian church-goer, align herself with such destructive nonsense? How can any 17-year-old know she's gay, anyway? Isn't it just a phase, won't she come around if we just put her together with a nice young man in the youth group? Even if she is gay, can't she just get married anyway to avoid embarrassment (or at least keep quiet about it)?

These are the strictures of the past, and they carry forward in a distressing way. Every so often I think about returning to a church I attended for 15 years, but I find I just can't do it. There is an inauthenticity there that clangs like a cymbal, resounds like a hollow gong, and there isn't a single person I can talk to about it without the fear of being judged or even edged out.

"If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing," a great writer once said.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

That sounds like a pretty good desription of a courageous young woman named Tory Inglis.

Angry squirrel on a roof

I don't know what these little buggers are so upset about. If I said these kinds of things in public, I might be locked up. Are they just territorial, or what? I'm just sayin'. I see them outside the window of my semi-new office, which faces out on green space. They take flying leaps, scurry up and down the cedars, and - we can't call it chattering or scolding. It's plain nasty, is what it is. The tail-flapping is definitely very macho. So do females do this too, in a display of machisma? Are they defending, what, the nut in their mouth(s), the nut buried under the tree, the tree itself? Or are they just nuts? Are they scaring away imaginary predators? Or just racketing off for the hell of it?

I'm just askin'.

Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell death footage

Contrary to past reports, there is indeed a secret video record of the death of Timothy Treadwell. It's so secret I'm posting it here right now.

Obviously, it was a mismatch, and the salmon inevitably went to Boo Boo the Bear.