Things to do with a floppy disk

Blogger's note. I found this delicious article in a magazine called The Magazine (from somewhere in Britain, the BBC I think). As usual I was looking for something else. I got watching old documentaries on YouTube about the history of the computer, The Machine That Changed The World (including one made in 1992 that approached the subject with a mixture of spine-chilling awe and goggle-eyed dread). Then I got watching old Commodore 64 ads ("I adore my 64. . . I rate with it, create with it, telecommunicate with it" - one of the best jingles ever). 

Then I found those old IBM ads with Charlie Chaplin, charming little vignettes designed to take the trembling horror out of this "new technology". The Mad Men of Madison Avenue must have decided to reach deep into the past and use a hapless, harmless, hopelessly anachronistic charmer (one that everyone instantly recognized) to neutralize people's fears of a soulless and totally-mechanized future. Didn't work, but it was a good try.

Anyway, before I get totally sidetracked, this list of "40 ways we still use floppy disks" came out almost three years ago. I just could not post the entire 40, so I did a bit of editing and limited myself to the more intriguing and original uses. 

(Hey, the floppy may not be dead yet. The other day I was on a publisher's web site and, after telling me in a scolding tone that I must type my manuscript on 8 1/2" x 11" white bond paper, double-spaced, on one side of the page only, in 12-point pica type, they told me that if by some far-flung chance they actually decided to BUY my manuscript, I was required to mail it to them on floppy disks. So you see? Some people in the publishing business still get by with 20-year-old computers. That's economy, by Jove!)

40 ways we still use floppy disks 

Floppy disks: headed for the museum, or treasured home for your data? When Sony said this week it was halting the production of floppy disks, the Magazine set out to discover who still buys and uses this anachronistic computer storage medium. Here are (not 40 - just the good ones) explanations for why floppy disks are still needed. 

I regularly buy floppy disks. I own a pub with a retro theme and I use them as beer mats.
Shaun Garrod, Ashby de la Soul

I am an artist from London and I use floppy disks to produce my paintings. I tile them up as canvases. The personal information on each disk is forever locked under the paint, but the labels are left as a clue. I use the circular hubs on the reverse for eyes!
Nick Gentry, London 

Not as much a user as an owner of a great many floppies, I was planning to tile the roof of my shed with them (using the two existing corner holes to take the nails) until my wife forbade it.

Erik Ga Bean, Stevenage, England 

Have you seen the cost of clays for skeet shooting? Pull!
Paul Taylor, St.Helens England

Drilling holes on four sides and interlocking them with industrial clips, I have created a retro futurist sliding curtain for a client's loft. Monochromatic colour floppies with occasional accents of bright red and yellow give different moods on sunny days or ambient lighting by night. On them are stored formulas and theories of leading edge scientists...
Paolo, Montreal

My band released our first single on a floppy as a gimmick last year. It took us quite a while to find somewhere that actually sold them anymore.
Chris Bennigsen, Manchester 

I buy these little beauties for a quite different reason. The floppy disk costs an average of £3.66 for 200, however they have a resale value of £5.50 at any good computer recycling centre, so I buy them in bulk and simply sell them directly at a profit. Take that, Bill Gates.
Cynthia, Tamworth

I still buy and use floppies for my electronic organ and some older synthesizers. Many professional keyboardists still own older synthesizers for their unique design and sheer power.
Nick Chan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I put handles on them and sell them as spatulas. I sell thousands of them a year.
Stan Russell, Squatney, Delaware – USA 

I buy about 100,000 floppies per year as I have a business that makes them into drinks mats, fridge magnets and toast racks.
Ken Pork, London

I have a stack of old 3.5" floppies I keep in a box. They work perfectly for adjusting a bookshelf or the like set up on carpet. If the bookshelf tilts, I just slide floppies under the appropriate corners until it's upright.
Greg Goebel, Loveland CO USA

I've always used an old floppy disk as an ice scraper for the car, just the right combination of rigidity and flexibility. Just don't use the side with the metal sleeve on. They last about a year before they need replacing from my endless pile from the 1990s.
Chris, Swindon, UK

I use a multitude of coloured floppies as a fashion statement, as part of outfits I make. The pieces I create are for cyberpunk/goth outfits.
Alexandra "Chii", Yorktown, Virginia, USA 

Romania's fiscal agency still requests documents on floppy to process taxes. 
Jack, Bucharest

Sad to say but there are a lot of ancient computers in church and school offices, and the old lady at the church or the school runs it the same as she did 20 years ago, so the floppy is her tool of choice. I donated a couple of newer used PCs to the church and had to take the floppy drives out of the old systems and put them in the new systems for her. Simply amazing.
Barry, Dayton Ohio, USA

Recently I decided to lay down some new concrete walkways at my home, and came upon the idea to grind up floppies (along with some other plastics) to mix in with the concrete. The addition of the fibres makes for a stronger concrete, and looks interesting as well.
New Orleans, LA, USA

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

It'll never happen: the scary world of computers

(Transcript of caption: hey, is that Eisenhower standing there, or what?):

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortras language, the computer will be easy to use.

Nothing but a raving bitch (and she shows her tits!)

Nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time. All the time.

This went as far back as she could remember and she could never find out why or even how it got started. Mostly it involved men, although she could remember a very few times when it had happened with powerful women, women whose attention she craved for some mysterious reason.

In the schoolyard, she was a pariah from the start, as if the other kids could just smell something on her which made them jerk violently away. She knew even then that it happened in the animal kingdom too, causing chickens to be pecked to death, or young eaten. She had seen a YouTube video, a really gross one, of a hamster eating its pink, squirming newborn offspring just as casually as if it had been a rabbit pellet.

In the past, I jumped and jumped after people and panted and bounded like a dog begging for attention, and the other person would totally ignore me, making me leap and bound and wag my ass even more, until finally they would slap my muzzle hard, causing me to yip in pain and slink away to hide under the bed with my tail between my legs. And then it would start all over again. These were called “relationships”.

Well, you have to take what you can get, don’t you? Aren’t you grateful to have people’s attention? What’s the matter with you? But in some ways, this masochistic pattern was beginning to seem to her like a case of “kiss the whip”. The kind of loneliness that was thrust on her in childhood bent and twisted the natural health of her soul into an impossible corkscrew that would never be straightened, like the spine of the Elephant Man or those wretched ancient bones of King Richard III.

It always started out well. It started out with at least a degree of mutual interest, with a frisson of excitement, a bouncing back and forth of energies. Often, years back, it all happened through the mail, scintillating handwritten letters exchanged with other writers, some of them even a little bit famous. There was a tinge of eroticism in these, at first.

Then it began to “turn”. It was at this point that I’d step up my activities.

In some cases the person moved, and moved, and I had to keep scrounging up forwarding addresses, at newspapers or literary mags or wherever. Sometimes it occurred to me that if I didn’t hold up both ends, the whole thing would come crashing down.

How long can you run back and forth on the tennis court, trying to hit the ball from both sides?

Oh, but there was one.  A musician, so she was a goner. God, he was beautiful, and he was friends with her, and he encouraged her music, her singing, even describing her voice as “gorgeous”. It was bait, and she snapped at it ravenously.

Then he moved away, and the emails began. Freed from social constraints, they began to flirt madly, skirting around the edges of sexuality. This man was an electronic Lothario without the courage to try anything face-to-face.

Plus he was lonely, teaching music in some northern outpost. Then the messages began to coolly pull away, tripping off that whining, salivating  dog syndrome once again.

I wrote all these songs, see. It was idiotic, but that’s what I did. I mean, I wrote the lyrics and he wrote the tunes. I must’ve written 30 lyrics, and I thought some of them were pretty good. In fact, I KNOW they were good. He wrote tunes to a couple of them, some of them very strange.  Often he carved up the lyrics, adding his own lines which always seemed nonsensical.

And then: a jazz concert at his school! His band would be performing one of MY songs:

SILLY BOY

You walked into my life

And left your footprints on my skin

I could never tell if loving you

Was joy, or sin

It seems that if I touch you, I fall right in

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Set my heart on you

You’re a dream

That has no hope of coming true

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

I thought you meant it when

You said you’d be with me a while

But staying close to someone

Is not your style

It seems I have a habit of self-denial

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Lost my mind for you

You’re a dream

That bathes my heart in shades of blue

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

And when you left without me

All my plans just blew away

I knew that my composure

Wouldn’t last the day

It seems it doesn’t matter if I try to pray

And so, I say:

Silly boy

You never should have

Played games with my soul

I’m a fool

Who has no hope of feeling whole

Now you’re gone

My heart’s an empty, aching hole

You stole my joy

You silly boy

Silly boy . . .

Yes. And he actually worked on this one and set it to a tune so the lead singer in his band could perform it!  I couldn’t be there, of course, but he sent me the audio.

The female singer, a picture of whom he also sent me (sooty-eyed, slinky, with shingly black hair and multiple piercings) sang;

“You came into my life

I didn’t know I’d been

Something like

Joy or sin or – um - ”

Suddenly the accompaniment roared up louder to cover the fact that she had completely forgotten the words.

Then there was the “igloo".  Sometime during her mad puppy-scramble around him, wagging the stump of her little amputated tail, she told him a story about her childhood (half-fabricated): about how Hermie Kneuchdel had a crush on her and surprised her by building an igloo for her in his back yard.

Should she have been surprised when he began to write his own lyrics, one of which said “you built an igloo in my heart/now I know we’ll never be apart,” or some inane thing?

Then he came back for a visit and wanted me to sit in his car. (What??) “You have to hear these new songs I wrote,” he said, and turned on his sound system.

The songs were obviously, obsessively about one “girl” that he was madly infatuated with. Many of the  metaphors were snagged out of MY work and casually incorporated. For one wild second, I thought they were about me. How else could he so casually steal all my best stuff?

“What’s all this - ”

“Oh. These are about Alison. She’s – she’s one of my students. Seventeen years old, but she’s a lot more mature than I am! We can’t really be seen together so we have to do a lot of sneaking around.”

That one died a slow death. When was the last email? The last stinging whip on the puppy dog’s quivering nose?

There is this much left. He sends me birthday greetings every year. It's automatic, in his computer. Nice of him.

How many more? Let me count. There was the sour-faced drama critic she corresponded with for years and years, until he suddenly, completely inexplicably, left her this message:  “I won’t ‘friend’ you because I hate Facefuck.  Get lost.” She had no idea what had caused the connection to turn so poisonous. What had she said? What had she done?

When he suddenly died, she posted an angry diatribe on her blog and was attacked from every angle by people who accused HER of being nasty and mean-spirited.  She remembered her psychiatrist saying, “Lonn van Dyke is the meanest, most narcissistic, heartless, self-centred, vindictive. . .” and on and on it went. (She wondered how he knew. Maybe some of his male patients had “talked”.) It was of some help, but not much.

Meantime, she was reamed out, eviscerated by people who refused to see how much truth there was in what she was saying. One blogger found a ridiculous picture of her pulling a weird face, blew it up huge, posted it, and spent 500 words or so stabbing her through the heart, just to be sure everyone knew what a twisted old crackpot she was: "This woman insisted on following him around and harassing, even stalking him. He had probably been trying to scrape her off the bottom of his shoe for years."

Was it really that bad?  She looked at her post a couple of hours later and realized it wasn't much better than Lonn's "Facefuck" remark. So she took it down and deleted it. There was not much use in posting a heap of ashes. How much easier it is to feud with someone when you never see them face-to-face!

So what did I think would happen? As with so many of these men, I never met him face-to-face, but I kept pushing at it, inserting little lines in my letters about “meeting for coffee”. Ludicrously, she bought a dress that she never wore, her “Lonn dress”. She joked about it to her girl friend, but she was deadly serious. Sometimes she thought she saw him at concerts and plays, but she was never sure enough to come up to him. She knew he hated people anyway.

She suspected he lived in an emotional cave, had no family  and was close to no one. When he died, the accolades from co-workers (all retired now) were almost apologetic, thinly-veiled versions of “well, he should have written for the New Yorker instead of this sad little backwater rag”.  Weirdly, the "rag" was the only paper that published anything about his death.

Meantime, what had happened to all the bile he had spewed for people's entertainment? His venom had made him famous all over town (if nowhere else). It was supposedly an honor in the local arts scene to be "van Dyked", though people secretly received much more pleasure from seeing other people attacked. They waved the columns around and made their friends read them, and chuckled and sniggered over his evisceration of their  colleagues, reading the choicest sentences out loud. This fanned the flames of  vindictive rivalry in the arts community and made Lonn happy, providing him with the only sense of power he ever had. 

But even this debacle with its train wreck ending wasn't enough; she had to start all over again. 

Oh, don’t count the rest. Don’t tot up the desperation. WHY do I do this, why can’t I just dump it? What might happen? A fuck? I don’t want to fuck these men, and half of them are gay anyway. Do I want fairy-tale magic, do I want to make it “work” just one time, to turn around an immutable fate?

Somebody said to me – sounded pretty lame at the time but maybe it’s true – it has something to do with my father, how he ignored me and emanated a sense I wasn’t welcome, that I never should have “been”. This was between bouts of drunken dining-room buffoonery and table-pounding about the injustices in his life. Incredibly, he once said (and I’m still trying to get my head around this) that everything in his life had been great until I came along. As if I “came along” under my own steam, a virus invading the family, rather than an accident caused by HIS stinking spermatozoa.

He told me, drunk, that it was plain this baby (me) was an accident and completely unwanted (though if I’d been a boy I might have squeaked through). So he told my Mum, “Don’t worry, this one will be smarter than all the other three put together. He’ll be a genius and play the violin like Paganini.” Another time he told me “well, when you’ve lost one baby” (my eldest sister, a crib death) “maybe you have to take on another one.” Something to plug the hole.

It seems to me I was dumped down the chute into a world of impossible expectations. I’ve been trying to buy my way in ever since. Are these men, these men whose sweetness is always tinged with sadism, supposed to be my way in, my key? Why has nothing I’ve ever done been good enough? Why does it magically turn into a slag heap the moment I’ve accomplished it?

And what’s the matter with you, anyway – aren’t you grateful for your life, for all these opportunities to connect with illustrious men?  With nasty infantile musicians, with bitter reclusive faggots? What ARE you, a parasite? You hate parasites, don’t you? What would happen to you if you stopped the ridiculous puppy-frisking and walked away from it all? Would you really be left with nothing?

Nothing?

  

(Blogger's note. Whew. I don't know what happens to me sometimes. I'm not saying there's no truth in this. What happens in fiction is fractal, or should I say fractured, kaleidoscopic pieces scrambled around and reconnected by imagination. If this were the whole truth about my life, I doubt if I'd be around any more. But there are certain issues. They go around and around. I don't know about other people because they don't talk about it. I suspect there are more hidden sinkholes and sore spots than people care to admit.

I found it interesting that I was so viciously attacked for my post on van Dyke, who comes the closest to a "real" person in this story (the others are more like composites). I think it happened because there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in what I was saying. This guy sent me Christmas cards for ten years, for God's sake! What caused him to turn on me so savagely?  I've never quite gotten used to being one of these people who gets attacked. The internet is a veritable playground for predators and sadists, because everyone is wearing the same blank mask.

I'm not much of a dog person - I find them uncomfortably loyal and prefer the idiosyncratic aloofness of cats. (More than two cats, however, is an affliction.) Right now I have a bird. What does that say about me, I wonder?

My original title for this story was either Bird Dog or She's a Bird Dog, but I didn't think people would remember that song (which I've always liked: "hey bird dog get away from my quail,/Hey bird dog, you're on the wrong trail". I think Hound Dog has stuck in people's memory because of Elvis, who was also too doggish for my tastes.) (P. S. I changed it again because I seem to have lost my entire readership. Should I dumb these down, I wonder, or put "tits" in every  title?)

Igor Stravinsky - 8 Instrumental Miniatures

Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become  preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all.  So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can.  Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean.  I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?

Let's Play With Shapes!: or, the concrete poetry of Dylan Thomas

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child.

Now

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt,
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

   If I were                tickled by

  the rub of love      a rooking girl

    who stole me for her side why then

    I might be able to write them shapes

     just the way Mr. Dylan Thomas could

       do, that is when he was not too sou

       sed by Divine Inspiration which has

      soused many a good writer into

     an early grave. If I were tick

      led by the rub of love, I

       might now have ear

        ned a little mon

        ey from all

          this non

           sens

            e

FLEE! FLY! FLO!: the Fe-M@il version

Flee!

(Flee!)

Flee Fly!

(FLee Fly!)

Flee Fly Flo!

(FLee Fly Flo!)

Fista!

(Fista!)

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

New Style New Style we got the new style,

Freestyle Meanwhile sister got it by a mile,

Lifestyle, girls smile, we can do it all the while.

Telephone dialing, rub-a-dub styling.

On a really cool tip, You can be a part of this trip

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this. 

(Ooooooooooooh!) Read my lips!

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

Watch me do it, you can do it this way

North and South and East and Westway

Monday to Sunday, gotta be a funday

We don't care what anyone's gonna say

On a really cool tip, You can be a part of this trip

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this.

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this.

Flee!

(Flee!)

Flee Fly!

(FLee Fly!)

Flee Fly Flo!

(FLee Fly Flo!)

Fista!

(Fista!)

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

Oooooooooooooooooooh! Re-fry this!

BLOGGER'S NOTE. It was only a matter of time until I found alternate versions of Flee Fly Flo. This is a great one, and I was all set to post a video of it as an example, when I read "subtitles" which said things like "fist my lips" and "don't fist your girl friend". As far as I can tell, fisting is a rather repugnant sexual practice which I don't associate with a wholesome, upbeat song like this one. So I didn't post it, then realized the subtitles were a hoax. Or at least I hope so. Maybe a dirty mondegreen, who knows.

Anyway! I found this other version, the original, which is pristine and has no mention of inserting bodily parts where the sun don't shine.  I like pop versions of these old things because it gives them an extended life in kids' minds. Immortality, if you will. The Clap-Clap song brought back to life my old "rubber dolly" rhyme, along with "three-six-nine, the goose drank wine," which for some reason reminds me of "down by the bay".

I also love the way the lyrics are set up, in word-sculptures, sort of like certain poems by Dylan Thomas (which I'll have to find. . . oh dear, there goes my afternoon).

This is one of those nights when I can't stop laughing

Is it just me, or is this the funniest shit I've seen in years? It isn't what they do, I guess, but the way they do it, and their characters, so hopelessly inept we all feel just a little bit better about ourselves. As the poet says, this is "an ecstasy of fumbling". 

I couldn't stop laughing myself teary-eyed all the way through this, and my husband came in and asked me if I had gone nuts, and I said, no, but you HAVE to see this, so I didn't delete it off the PVR but I don't know if he'll watch it or if he'll find it funny. Maybe you hadda be there.

I've always loved L & H, in their simple little low-budget Hal Roach early talkies with the same music playing in a continuous loop in the background (the same music as in the Our Gang comedies, I might add, which I also slavishly watched as a kid, though for some reason we called them the Little Rascals.) 

After seeing the condor flailing around on the ice, I was already prepared for an ecstasy of fumbling.

YOU MUST SEE THIS: Disaster at the hockey arena!

This needs no explanation, but I'll explain it anyway: somebody decided to bring a real condor to a Bakersfield Condors hockey game and make it sit regally on a perch in the middle of the ice. FAIL!! I've seen this three times and it just gets funnier, especially when they give up and roll up the red carpet at the end.

The colour commentators are funny enough by themselves, sounding as if they might have gotten into the wacky tobaccy.

Oh, no, no, no. . . it can't be. . . but it IS!

Why do these things come into my head? Today I was walking in Mundy Park, freezing to death on a dank damp trail and feeling a little sorry I'd come, when I heard something in my head.

Something from the past.

It.

Was.

The

Sound of clapping.

A lot of people clapping.

A lot of people clapping at recess. In a circle. Mostly girls, and along with the clapping they were chanting a very strange sort of song.

The words (I'll have to reproduce them phonetically) sounded something like:

Coom-la, coom-la, coom-la feast-a
Ah, nah, nah, na-na-nah feast-a
Eenie meanie etcha- meanie
O-walla walla-meanie
(repeat)
A-nit-nat-natty-naughty-nit-nat-naught
(shhhhh)
FLEE!
(flee)
FLY!
(fly)
FLEE-FLY-FLOW!
(flee-fly-flow)
FEAST-AHH!
(repeat until school bell rings).

I don't even remember if I was part of the clapping circle or not. Probably not, as I was never included in anything - not that I tried very hard to be included. But I do remember it and it struck me as very odd, and then it sort of went to the back of my mind into that foggy place where you can't tell if things are real or not.

I honestly doubted that it happened. I never thought about it anyway.

Then. Today on that trail, not feeling very well, suddenly along with the clapping (quite rapid clapping, by the way, really ripping along), I seemed to hear:

FLEE!
(flee)
FLY!
(fly)
FLEE-FLY-FLOW!
(flee-fly-flow)
FEAST - AHH!

It was probably something like those old TV shows I could never find anything about (though if you revisit YouTube a couple of years later, you almost always find something). I tried googling "coom-la coom-la coom-la feast-a", and got exactly nothing. It didn't occur to me to google Flee-Fly-Flow, which is the actual name of the song (though I seem to remember we sang it in reverse order). But eventually, burrowing around YouTube, I hit on the above video and thought it came closest to the spirit of the song, if not the lyrics I remember (which shift and change with every version, like any good folk song). I wasn't a Brownie or a Girl Guide and never went to summer camp (God, I was a freak), so didn't realize that, along with Found a Peanut and 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, this was a  favorite and was sung seemingly everywhere.

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently heard my nine-year-old granddaughter Caitlin chanting some clapping/skipping songs from the schoolyard. They weren't like mine, but they were cool, with the same sort of infectious rhythm. Hell, I was just glad to hear that girls still skip! Most of them weigh 350 pounds, so probably have a hard time getting off the ground.

I shared some of my own decrepit clapping/skipping rhymes with her, minus chunks of lines that escape me, These were met with that "are-you-out-of-your-mind?" eye-roll that I know so well:

I was standing on the corner, not doing any harm
Along came a p'liceman, and took me by the arm
He dragged me round the corner and rang a funny bell
He (something, something, something) and put me in my cell

(Something, something, something) I looked up on the wall,
The bedbugs and the cooties were having a game of ball.
The score was ten to nothing, the bedbugs were ahead,
The cooties scored a home-run, and knocked me out of bed.

This probably isn't too exotic, as I was easily able to find it on the net (though it was under Songs of Southern Michigan, for some reason. Never mind, I lived near Detroit.) Others seem very old to me because the imagery is from another time (and another form of manufacture):

My Mama told me
If I was good-y
That she would buy me
A rubber dolly
My unkie told her
I kissed a soldier
Now she won't buy me
A rubber dolly

(Please note, this came BEFORE it was incorporated into the "clap-clap" hit song and was sung to a completely different tune. We always said "unkie" rather than "auntie", for some reason.)

And there was another one that had dance steps to it, I remember. No tune, just rhythmically chanted:

Charlie Chaplin went to France
To teach the ladies how to dance
First the heel, then the toe,
Right, left, and away we go!

I kind of doubt that ten-year-olds today know who Charlie Chaplin was, but you never know. WE did, because there was actually a Charlie Chaplin show on TV every Friday night, right after the Addams Family: a couple of his early two-reelers. I remember hearing kids discussing it on Monday.

Compared to these primitive childhood war-chants, Flee Fly Flow is beginning to sound like La Traviata. So who wrote this, where did it come from? Some say Latin America - which is quite plausible, because some interpret the second line as "oh, no, no, no, not da Vista" (whatever that means). Other sources claim it's African. The nit-not line, which always struck me as very silly, is probably wrong, somebody's "mondigreen" version. And in fact, this entire song may be a mondigreen (a mis-heard lyric: see previous post).

Like "a ram-sam-sam", it might just be a bunch of nonsense syllables strung together in Jabberwockian fashion.  But it's fun. And it actually exists.

Post-post: That formidable brick building, pictured below, is MY SCHOOL: McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario, which I attended from 1959 to 1964. I don't remember it looking so much like a federal penitentiary, but I guess it did. There was a girl's side and a boy's side and we were not allowed to mix. Almost all the teachers were elderly spinsters, and our principal Mr. Robertson was an ex-navy man who ran a tight ship. We marched in to military music in the morning (I remember especially "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning", which turned out to be by Irving Berlin), and every so often Mr. R. would come and inspect the troops. We had to stand at attention until he said "at ease" (no kidding - no one ever believes this). Once in a while we had a treat: we all got to troop down into the nightmarish basement of the place to watch a "fillum". This would usually be a National Film Board educational fillum on hygiene, though we were still too young for warnings about VD. I do remember one about head lice and hygiene (i. e. it only happens to filthy reprobates). This school still functioned up until a few years ago. I don't know what the status is of it now: ghosts probably roam the hall, including Mr. McGuinness, the scary old janitor who was half out of his mind, and the Reverend Russell Horsburgh, who was COMPLETELY out of his mind. Oh, my childhood.