Best role models for kids in the '60s

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


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Duelling dulcimers

For reasons unknown, I can no longer post a YouTube video in the usual way. I have to do back-flips and stuff (i. e. I can't browse, but already have to know the name of it in order to find it!). This however is worth any kerfuffle. I'm not a mountain music fan, but this stuff! Mountain dulcimer can be excruciating, like playing stretched wires (which I guess it is), but these two make it sound golden. She's a tad sedate and he's really groovin' (holding his instrument aslant as if it will soon tip right off his lap). But when they look at each other at the end. . . it's the sweetest moment.

I'm always digging around for the wacky 78 rpm recordings of my childhood, especially the Children's Record Guild collection, a sort of record-of-the-month club that mailed you a new recording for something like $2. We didn't subscribe to this, but were given a whole whack of recordings, 50 or 60 of them maybe, by someone whose kids must either have never played them, or were so careful they didn't even leave a scratch on them.

Within a couple of months, Davy Crockett sounded like, "king of the wild frontier. . .tier. . . tier. . . tier. . . tier" (etc.)  The background ambience soon resembled World War 3, but the records were well-loved and constantly played.

Some records represented the force-feeding of classical music, with Cinderella accompanied by music from Prokofiev's ballet and Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn's incidental music. This was all part of a general indoctrination I suffered through: almost everything I heard, saw, smelled or touched (or tasted?) had to be oriented towards "good" music. No other music (not even "that rock 'n roll music" I later came to love) existed in our tiny stifling universe.

Thus came various musical punishments: Victor Borge narrating some sort of swill about "Piccolo, Saxie and Company"; Rusty in Orchestraville, a morality tale about what happens to little boys who don't practice the piano; Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met (already covered in a previous post, so let's not go there again). And something about the history of the orchestra which, I remember, began with a smarmy narrator saying, "Well, well, well! Here is an orchesta!" And here I thought it was a cheese blintz.

It really was a narrowing education, not a broadening one. We should have known something about mountain music, about jazz and blues, but my father looked down on these renegade forms as if they didn't exist. I think it came from his background of dire poverty, his ignorance of any music except for the excruciatingly bad English music-hall stuff he grew up with. He was always terrified of being found out and even deliberately erased his Cockney accent on arriving in Canada.

I remember (and even found on YouTube once) a Children's Record Guild 78 rpm recording - might have been by the Weavers, in fact - of a song called Round and Round the Christmas Tree, which is the same tune as this dulcimer duet. I think of the fluidity of this kind of music, passed along by memory and never written down. The fact that Appalachian music has echoed through the generations with its integrity intact fascinates me. No Children's Record Guild required: they had memories then, and ears to hear.

Kiddie Records Weekly

http://www.kiddierecords.com/2006/archive/week_05.htm

OLLA! Caitlin and Ryan in Mexico

Chow-chow-chow! Talented cats

Hello, Matt!

Compare and contrast!

Bad Girls in College: has anything changed?

While jazzing around the topic of college girls and morality, I came across an antique ad poster which is unintentionally hilarious (see yesterday's post). Written in 1905, it warned young girls - and their parents - of the evils of college life, implying (with a sledge hammer) that higher education turns virtuous young women into raving sluts, ruined for all prospects of marriage and respectability.

Then I found this astonishing (contemporary) treatise online. I cannot even imagine a college girl, tasting personal freedom for the first time, soberly reading this thing and saying to herself, "Well then, I guess I had better stay away from  parties and remain chaste, saving myself for the holy bonds of wedlock."

Between the lines, beyond the supposed candour and up-to-date medical viewpoint, this thing is as antiquated, as repressive and condescending as that poster depicting the smoking slut in the slip. I will attempt some up-to-the-minute commentary in between a few choice excerpts.

Sense and Sexuality  

The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world.

By Miriam Grossman, M.D. (Note that it's written by a doctor!)

Intimacy promotes attachment and trust


Intimate behavior floods your brain with a chemical that fuels attachment. Cuddling, kissing, and sexual contact releases oxytocin, a hormone that announces: I’m with someone special now. Time to switch love on, and caution off.


Gentle reader: knowest thou whether thy lower nature is inclining thee towards base behaviour? Knowest thou not that the impulses of Eve are as seductive now as when she first handed Adam the apple?

When oxytocin levels are high, you’re more likely to overlook your partner’s faults, and to take risks you otherwise wouldn’t. So you certainly do not want your brain drenched in this hormone when making critical decisions like, What do I think of him? How far do I want this to go? When it comes to sex, oxytocin, like alcohol, turns red lights green. It plays a major role in what’s called “the biochemistry of attachment.” Because of it, you could develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you. You might think of him all day, but he can’t remember your name.

Maidens! Thinkest thou that he be of good family, of peerless reputation? Prithee, reconsider. The merest hint of oxytocin in thy innocent veins may stimulate a flood of reprehensible behaviour. Beware the Biochemistry of Attachment! Consider it before ever accepting a date with one of these beasts! Warn him in advance, "I won't kiss you tonight. My oxytocin levels are too high."

Science confirms: alcohol makes him hot ... when he’s not.

Did you hear? Science has confirmed the existence of “beer goggles”—when a person seems more attractive to you after you’ve had a few drinks. Enjoy a glass of wine or a couple of beers at a party, and the guy hitting on you  begins to look better than when you arrived. It works the other way too: guys will find your face prettier after they’ve had a few.

Dost thou believe that a single sip of beer or a few jello shots can never ruin thy reputation? Get real, maidens! It takes but one taste, especially if thine drink be spiked with the Date Rape drug. Do thine homework before taking that first slug!

In a British study, 80 college students rated photos of unfamiliar faces of men and women their age; alcohol consumption significantly raised the scores given to photos of the opposite sex. Drinking affects the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain used to determine facial attractiveness. It’s probably one of several reasons that casual, high risk sex is often preceded by alcohol consumption. In the morning, you both look different.

Recognizeth thou the face of thy seducer? I thought not, any more than he recognizeth thee. Be-eth he as ugly as the back end of an elephant? Didst  thou not receive warning before indulging in  this debauchery? Take heed to the nucleus accumbens! When discussing sex with thy girl friends, make sure you bring up the nucleus accumbens! When talking to a prospective suitor, let the nucleus accumbens be thy first order of business!

A younger cervix is more vulnerable to infection.

Your cervix, the entrance to your uterus, has a vulnerable area one cell thick, called the transformation zone. It’s easy for HPV (the human papillomavirus, which can cause genital warts, and even cervical cancer) to settle in there. That’s why most teen girls are infected from one of their first sexual partners. By adulthood the transformation zone is replaced with a thicker, tougher surface. So it’s wise to delay sexual activity, or, if you’ve already started, to stop.

Stop, young maidens, stop! Stop thy beating heart! Stop thy throbbing, oh, whatever. Is it not worth the price of death to retain thy virtue?

Even though these infections are common, and usually disappear with time, learning you have one can be devastating. Natural reactions are shock, anger, and confusion. Who did I get this from, and when? Was he unfaithful? Who should I tell? And hardest of all: Who will want me now?

Ah, the price of wantonness. Ruined, ruined! Will any man look upon thee now without seeing a raving slut? "Oh, how I wish I had paid heed to my nucleus accumbens!"

These concerns can affect your mood, concentration, and sleep. They can deal a serious blow to your self esteem. And to your GPA.

Though thou art attending college to snag a husband, not to attain a degree, a careless slide in your GPA may lead to sliding in other areas, such as morality. It doth be a slippery, nay, a well-lubricated slope.

The HPV vaccine is a major achievement, but the protection it provides is limited. You are still vulnerable to other infections like herpes, chlamydia, HIV, and non-covered strains of HPV.

And of course no vaccine prevents a broken heart.

Take heed, gentle maidens. Thou mayest have a broken heart along with a ruptured hymen (not to mention a cervix flooded with oxytocin). Is this merely the inevitable price of higher education. . . or the wages of wanton moral abandon? Ask thy doctor to explain all this to you before you make that "other" visit in a couple of months.

The Post-Blog Afterglow:

Since posting all that early-19th-century-via-2013 stuff above (in about 6 different fonts, but that's just how it came out), I found out a little bit more about this Miriam Grossman. To put it bluntly, she's something to the right of Atilla the Hun and would rather young girls not have sex at all. I can't quote everything in her lovely little pamphlet (which lacks the slutty cover, but otherwise is pretty much the same), but I did find this "nugget" which I had to pass along:



The rectum is an exit, not an entrance.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

And about those other sexual activities ...
Having more than five oral sex
partners has been associated with throat cancer.
Turns out that HPV can cause malignant tumors in
the throat, just like it does in the cervix.
In a study of sexually active college men, HPV
was found both where you’d expect—the genital
area—and where you wouldn’t: under fingernails.

Yes, you read that right. Researchers now speculate
whether the virus can be shared during activities
considered “safe,” like mutual masturbation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control,
approximately 30% of all women will have had
anal intercourse by the age of 24. Even with
condoms, this behavior places them at increased
risk of infection with HIV and other STDs. For
example, the risk for HIV transmission during anal
intercourse is at least 20 times higher than with
vaginal intercourse.

The government website, www.fda.gov, provides
no-nonsense advice about avoiding HIV: “Condoms
provide some protection, but anal intercourse is
simply too dangerous to practice.”
The rectum is an exit, not an entrance. Anal
penetration is hazardous. Don’t do it.

Your fertility is a window of opportunity that will close.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Seventy-five percent of college freshmen
say that raising a family is an “essential or
very important goal.” But 55% of younger highachieving
women are childless at 35. And 89% of
them think they’ll be able to get pregnant into
their forties.

OK, time out. It’s easiest for a woman to
conceive and deliver a healthy child in her
twenties. Fertility declines slightly at 30, and
more dramatically at 35. You may imagine that
the waiting rooms of fertility clinics are packed
with obese women smoking cigarettes. If so,
you’re wrong: they are filled with health-conscious
women who work out and count calories. They are
there because they’re forty.

If having children is one of your dreams, it
won’t hurt to keep these facts in mind as you
make decisions about careers and relationships.
Remember that motherhood doesn’t always happen
when the time is right for you; there’s a window of
opportunity, then the window closes.
For some women, just as this window is
closing, they feel an unexpected longing for a child.

It saddens me each time a patient describes this—
typically a student who always put career first, and
is finally getting a Ph.D. at 38 or 40. She’s thrilled
to reach that milestone, but aches for another: to
feel a new life inside her, to give birth.
The rewards of sexuality—with the right guy,
at the right time—are immense. Ask an older
woman you respect who waited and chose
the right man; you might be surprised to hear
her describe love and passion that has lasted for
decades—and k

ENOUGH ENOUGH ENOUGH! What IS this Clare Booth Luce Policy thingie, anyway? Why not just tie her legs together, for God's sake, or take out the whatever-gland, what it is that makes young women horny in the first place.

I gather this is pretty far-right-wing stuff, at least from the criticisms of it I've found on the net. Dr. Grossman may be Jewish, but she burns with Republican fervor as surely as those right-wing fundamentalist jackasses on phone-in radio. Read between the lines, and we're talking chastity, the kind of thing Southern Bab-tist girls make vows about while wearing gauzy white dresses and dancing with their fathers.

Hey! Who's the slut in the slip?

I remember looking for this a couple of years ago, and coming away feeling foolish, as if I'd imagined it. There was no sign of it anywhere then. It was in a book about women's sexuality during the Edwardian era. Obviously, higher education was a road to ruin in those days, with fresh young college girls soon deteriorating into chain-smoking, un-bed-making, card-playing, sleazy-magazine-reading, barefoot, tousle-haired, slip-strap-sliding SLUTS.

To transcribe the text:

Is College Bad for Girls? A Personal Canvass. Articles:

* Evils of Dormitory Life - Midnight Hours of Who Knows What?

* Flirting and Speaking to Male Students without Proper Introduction and             
  Chaperone.

* Reading Improper Novels, Magazines, and Other Suggestive Literature.

* Forming of Unladylike Habits that May Harm the Health and Morals of a delicate Girl - Such as Smoking and Card Playing.


I love the fact that this pamphlet (and wouldn't you like to get your hands on the whole thing?) was "available from your doctor". Now, just what sort of doctor would that be?

Doing a little more burrowing into all this salacious filth, I found this astonishing artifact: a personal canvas (tote, probably) printed with the Personal Canvass!

It isn't super-obvious unless you blow this up big, but her left nipple is showing. Is she being deliberately provocative, or is it just a wardrobe malfunction?

Rest in Peace, Mr. Trololo

I was truly shocked and sorry to hear (belatedly - I can't keep up with all these things!) of the death of Mr. Trololo, that internet sensation whose song - well, what WAS it called anyway? Trololo? - made him an internet sensation 30 years after the fact.

I saw some video of him taken a couple of years ago, and he seemed like his usual jaunty self. Hadn't really aged that much. He must have avoided the vodka-and-cigarettes diet so common in Vladivostok.

I will miss him. I truly feel sad about this. Do you know why I liked him so much? He was fun. His jollity was refreshing. His voice was really pretty good, too, compared to the atrocious swill I've been posting in the past couple of days. I found the playlist of an album he cut long ago, and I'll try to dredge it up because it's pretty entertaining, too.

May you find happiness in heaven, Mr. Trololo.

(From Wikipedia - I'm paraphrasing for emphasis):

He was the first artist to sing such songs as:

Woodcutters (Лесорубы in Russian)  

Moon Stone (Лунный камень) by Arkady Ostrovsky 

Song about Friend (Песня о друге) 

Blue Cities (Голубые города)

And People Go To the Sea (А люди уходят в море) by Andrey Petrov

Other popular songs performed by Khil included: 

From What the Homeland Begins? (С чего начинается Родина?) 

How the Steamers Are Seen Off (Как провожают пароходы) 

Winter (Зима) 

Birch Sap (Берёзовый сок)

Alder Catkin  (Серёжка ольховая)

We Need Only the Victory (Нам нужна одна победа) 

and many others.

Khil's manner of execution of songs is unique and easily recognizable in 

Russia, characterized by charm, always having a great sounding bright, 

sonorous voice and the flight of lyrical baritone, with the powerful charge of 

optimism and humour.

Ele-pants (or: Trunk Envy)

The world of the contemporary knitter is strange. And growing stranger. There's some sort of guerrila movement afoot to festoon public facilities like park benches with, well, knitty-things. It's called Guerrilla Knitting or some-such. I should look it up right now. (Nah.)

These artistic installations are done by young knitters, and I don't know what possesses them to pick up needles and wool in the first place. Knitting was always a Grandma-thing, wasn't it?

I'm one of the oldsters, the Beehive pattern set who used to knit on long, straight steel needles that I still have. Cold as hell, clanky, scrapy, heavy, and horrible. I wonder if the daring new set of Yarn Harlots uses these. Probably not. . . maybe they knit with their fingers.

OK, I looked it up:

Yarn bombing, yarnbombing, yarnstorming, guerrilla knitting, urban knitting or graffiti knitting is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk.

I'd-a just dismissed all this as an urban myth, but when I was going to the Dollarama with Caitlin (9 years old and savvy about everything), she pointed to a brightly-colored tangle of textile artfully draped on a  fence pole and said, "Look, Grandma. Yarn bombing."

The one Caitlin and I saw wasn't like the colorful tree cozy you see above. To me it looked like one of the reluctant snarls I sometimes have to pitch into the garbage (i. e. the panda I killed with scissors, many posts ago). I don't know how you do the stripey ones.. I guess you shimmy up there and knit it right on to the tree.

ANYWAY, I am now far off-topic. I wanted to compare notes on some elephant-ware I have seen on the net lately. I'm attempting my first elephant from a book called World of Knitted Toys which attempts to represent the animals therein in a more realistic way than usual.

I doubt if the blighter will look like this, but I can try. So far he is using up more and more yarn, so that I will have to go trotting back to Michaels (again), praying it all works out in the end.

I suspect these are dolls, not human beings ((in fact I have an awful feeling the bottom one is a silicone Reborn, the type elderly Southern women talk to and rock to sleep at night). The hats are cute, aren't they? But why not knit the body and be done with it?

Strange elephants. Looking as they have received electroshock therapy in the recent past. But cute, also, in a sort of abstract way.

I'm not going to be critical of anyone who knits a whole elephant. It's a long and often tedious process. This is the snuggle-bug variety who has a rare talent for climbing trees (or else a strange sort of elephantine yarn bomb).

Heads bigger than bodies. Might they tip over in the wild?

I have a pet peeve, and a serious one: knitted stuffies with no eyes. They look creepy and devoid of all character or expression. In my case, sometimes the only thing that saves a project from the garbage pail (over which most of my things hover at least 3 or 4 times) is giving it a face: eyes, a mouth, a nice little smile or nose holes.

I have a few more pictures,  but this breathtaking image sweeps them all aside. These are called elephant pants (or elephant underwear: would you really want to wear these in public?)  Obviously, careful measurements would need to be taken before you proceed. I don't know how it must feel to sit on those ears, and there is no discernible fly, making it less convenient than the average tighty-whitey pair of gaunch. But at least this one has a facial expression, almost as if it's smiling. Or something.

Why don't I just kill myself right now?

On the internet, to quote the words of Robert Frost, “way leads on to way”, which is how I came to find (or rediscover – I had seen the hurdy-gurdy one before years ago) those last few excruciatingly beautiful videos. But I found other stuff. I couldn’t help but conclude that the popular culture (nay, even the medical community) thinks of the average post-menopausal woman as a worn-out old horse.

Maybe when the ovaries close up shop, it’s all over, or it’s supposed to be. Unless you’re Carol Burnett or Mary Tyler Moore (both married to dishy, much-younger men) and can afford to pull the skin of your face back and tie it behind your head, you’re on the reject pile along with moldy old VHS tapes (or Beta!) and giant hand-cranked cell phones from the early 1990s.

It’s those diagrams. Men don’t have those diagrams. And EVERYTHING they list is negative, uncomfortable, miserable, and adds to a woman’s unattractiveness. Caved-in breasts, straggly hair, weak heart, shrivelled vagina, etc. etc. Expecting a man to find this attractive is asking too much. Might as well send him to a museum to make love to the fossils.

Is it really this way? I don’t know, even though I’ve been in this land-of-obsolescence for longer than I care to admit. After a rocky period at the end of my fertility, my cycle reset by taking birth control pills (YES, BIRTH CONTROL PILLS, THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL LIKE ALL HORMONES), I don’t remember it being all that bad. (We don't take hormones - EVER - because hormones kill us and besides, we're just supposed to grit our teeth and take whatever Mother Nature dishes out, for the ten or so years of that vaguely-defined span known as "perimenopause".)

My body isn’t the same, but when WAS it? This is when the only-moderately-attractive woman gets her revenge. There isn’t as far to fall, see. My appearance has waxed and waned throughout my life. In every case, I look back on photos from years ago and think, you know, I really looked a lot better than I thought.

I had a dream last night that some university professor made us all go for a makeover (I’m leaving out chunks I don’t remember), so I had to go get my chin waxed. I have never had even one hair sprout there, in fact, almost all my leg hair has disappeared and I never have to shave under my arms (in direct contradiction to that “body hair coarsens and increases” bullshit). And I had something done to my, well, thing on my neck or whatever, the Grandma thing that I guess I should mind, but don’t particularly. I don’t know what they were doing with it: trying to dissolve it with acid?

This salon or whatever it was had a big glassed-in cage with birds in it, mostly miniature cockatoos. I don’t know what they were doing there. It was as disjointed as all my dreams, meandering around in the maze of my subconscious. My bare legs were a blaze of color and seemed to have been tattooed, though I had no memory of it.

As I said. . . my body hair has nearly disappeared, my breasts haven’t fallen down to my knees yet (in fact, they fell about as far as they were going to fall right after I weaned my second child). My hair is probably better than it has ever been, coarser, which is just what I needed for my thin, fine, limp locks. For the first time in my life, I have a hair style. So all this unspeakable horror can work to your advantage.

It’s not that I never get depressed, but I got depressed all the rest of my life too, so it kind of blends together. Now I get depressed or morose or just pensive about mortality. Mainly I get pensive because so many of my friends have died prematurely, and oh how I miss them. I’ll never see them again.

How should I feel about this stage of my life? Dismayed, I guess, that all my worth as a female has (supposedly) passed the expiry date.  God, the diagrams leave no doubt, do they? Cross-sections of breasts, each atom of a woman’s body with labels on it, all dire and depressing. We are meat. I don’t remember seeing any such thing relating to a male body, except perhaps a cross-section of a testicle, the only part that really matters. The rest of a man’s body never changes anyway.

Are these diagrams meant to cheer us up, to educate us, or what? Or just make us want to go out and commit suicide because we’re so useless? Nowhere is there stated that this is a highly individual process, and that some aspects of life (like sex and orgasm: no kidding!) may actually improve after menopause. Just to mention such a possibility is so “ick” that no one ever does it. A grandmother wanting, needing, LIKING sex? Jesus!  Excuse me while I go someplace and spit up.

When I breast-fed my kids I felt sort of like a Jersey cow, smelling like sour milk all the time while my baby threw up what looked like cottage cheese. I wasn’t disgusted by it because I adore my children without reservation, then and now, but it did give me pause: men never experience anything this blatantly corporeal, except maybe ejaculation (and it’s over pretty fast). Women are pods growing the creatures that will inherit the earth.. Spawn. Frog jelly. When the frog jelly is no longer forthcoming, oops, it’s time to hit the road to hopelessness.

AND THE HITS. . . just KEEP ON COMING!

There isn't much to say about this one. It's simply baffling. Unlike the others, one wishes this would go on forever so you can figure out WTF is happening here! At the very end is a flicker of the same morose man grinning away. This was the golden era of grainy, flickery VHS or Beta tape in the early '90s, which at the time we thought was the marvel of the ages. I remember thinking: how does the VCR KNOW to record TV shows even when the TV isn't turned on? Isn't that impossible? This video will either make your jaw drop, or inspire a religiious conversion.

God, let it soon be over: yet another worst video ever made

The last two videos seemed like a tie for the worst ones ever made, until I found (or rediscovered) this one. These people are completely unfamiliar with the concept of rehearsal. The accompanist is obviously on something, maybe blood pressure medicine, or else is that way all the time.

Yes, this music is spiritual, in that you pray it will soon be over.