TERROR AT MONSTER HIGH!

Terror at Monster High!

A Nanny Tale

(Author's note: written for Erica and Lauren's birthday party yesterday!)

One day Erica and Lauren were playing with their Monster High dolls. They had a lot of Monster High dolls, about six million of them. It was raining outside and they were bored.

“What if WE could be Monster High dolls? Wouldn’t that be fun?” Erica asked.

“No. It would be scary. It’s a bad idea.”

“It’s a great idea. I’m going to wish I was a Monster High doll.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Lauren warned her.

But Erica did not listen.

“I wish I was a Monster High doll. I wish I was a Monster High doll,” Erica chanted over and over again.

“No, you’re doing it wrong,” Lauren said. “You have to have a wishbone or a star or something, to wish on.”

”I thought you said it was a bad idea.”

”I want to see if it works on you first.”

“I know! I’ll wish on Autumn.”

So poor Autumn had to stay still while Erica wished on her.

“I wish I was a Monster High doll. I wish I was a Monster High doll.”

“Hey wait a minute, you have to decide WHICH Monster High doll you want to be,” Lauren reminded her.

“I want to be able to change into different dolls any time I want to.”

“Oh-oh,” thought Lauren. “This girl is going to get into trouble.”

But just then, a strange sort of mist wafted into the room. It was green and didn’t smell very good.

“Did you fart?” asked Lauren, very disgusted.

“No, I didn’t. It means the spell is beginning to work.”

Erica had a very weird feeling. It felt like she was turning into someone else!

Then, suddenly. . .

POOF!

“You look a little different,” Lauren commented.

”You have to try this, it’s neat! Just wish on Autumn!” But by this time Autumn had run upstairs to use the litter box.

“Just wish on anything, then,” Erica told her.

“OK. I wish on Blah, Blah, Blah.”

Poof!  She had turned into a Monster High doll!

“Let’s test it out. I want to change dolls now. POOF!”

POOF!

It worked! The girls could change into any doll they wanted to.

But then something strange happened.

They heard  footsteps.

Thud. Thud. Thud, down the stairs. Who could it be? A giant? A witch?

Could this be Autumn? Oh, no! She was hideous! She looked like a monster!

She must have been caught in the spell!

“Quick, undo the spell,” Erica cried.

“Hey, you started this!”

“Autumn, I wish you would stop looking so scary!”

POOF!

Then something even worse happened.

There was something moving under the sofa. It had a lot of legs.

Autumn reached under the sofa with her paw and dragged it out.

IT WAS THE BIGGEST, WORST,  MOST DISGUSTING BUG 
THAT EVER LIVED!

“Look how big,” Lauren screamed.

“And how disgusting.”

“But we’re supposed to like things like that.”

Then Autumn put her paw under the sofa again.

“No, Autumn, NO!” the girls cried in unison. But it happened again.

Now there were TWO disgusting bugs!

“Look!” Erica pointed to the back yard. It was full of a million bugs!

“I’m not going out in that,” Lauren said.

“And look at those scary cats.!”

“They must be Autumn’s new friends.”

"We have to get out of this spell. Put me back to the way I was, put me back to the way I was. . .”

“It won’t work. Autumn is one of them now. There’s no way out.”

Lauren tried to scream. . . but no sound would come out.

Erica realized that what Lauren was telling her was true: they would be Monster High dolls for the rest of their lives. It might be fun, but there would be a lot of bugs.

Then suddenly, Mummy and Daddy appeared in the door.

But they didn’t look like Mummy and Daddy.

AT ALL.

Something had changed. Mummy and Daddy were MONSTER HIGH DOLLS, just like all the rest of them!

“I told you this was a bad idea,” said Lauren.

“How are we going to get out of this?”

”Daddy looks weird,” said Erica in a low voice.

It was true. Daddy looked weird, and he was getting weirder. Mummy looked so strange, you couldn’t tell who she was.

Suddenly a million bugs began to crawl all over the floor! Everyone was swallowed up in a green fog! Help, help!

”AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

”I want to go back to the way I was. I want to go back to the way I was.” Everyone began to chant this over and over again, even Autumn. Then the giant disgusting bugs began to chant along with them. Suddenly. . .

POOF!

Had it all been a dream? It was as if nothing had happened at all. Everyone was back the way they had been before the Terror at Monster High.

“I don’t know,” Erica said to Lauren. “I think it was kind of fun.”

“You think it was fun? Then how about THIS?” 

She pulled a giant bug out from under her shirt and stuck it down Erica’s back. Erica screamed and ran out of the room so fast she left a trail of fire.

“I told  her to be careful what she wished for,” said Lauren to herself with a smile.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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DON'T LOOK DOWN!: Harold Lloyd short takes

Although it's late, I have a cold and feel bloody awful, and should've gone to bed a long time ago, an obsession is an obsession, n'est-ce pas? So, gentle reader, I made these few gifs, smudgy and surreal, Just For You. Enter his world at your peril, for you may never find your way home again.

 

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
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Barnes & Noble

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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Any good idea is worth beating to death!

Compare and contrast: one is dark and moody - in fact it's kind of broody - Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis. The anonymous worker helplessly grapples with the hands of a huge clock, a piece of machinery that seems to rule everything (including time itself). This is one of the film's creepiest and most disturbing images.

And then there's this guy who plays it for comedy - Harold Lloyd in his own masterpiece, the 1923 comedy Safety Last! But what sort of thunderbolt of inspiration gave him the idea to dangle from an enormous clock? If we free-associate, we come up with a few things: the hands on the clock/HIS hands on the clock, time running out, turning back the hands of time, the clock striking midnight, the crash of the stock market that ended the dizzy joy of the '20s: and who knew it was coming, who could hold back that inevitable stroke of doom?

This guy is also swingin', and it can't end well. The bizarre scrambled numbers on the clock face make no sense (for surely they ought to go to 11), and neither does the constant, frantic manipulation of the hands to avoid some sort of industrial disaster. The size of the clock doesn't quite square with Harold's, but the idea? Did it come to Lang in a dream? Was he thinking of Harold Lloyd at all?

Harold's fear is height, and the Metropolis drone's fear is immolation, a literal meltdown. In any case, they have to hold on, though the struggle seems hopeless. 

Exposed like the Wizard of Oz, here the clock becomes a bizarre mechanical wheel of fortune, its awful impersonal gauges and dials a reminder that technology is always in charge (and I have to say this, it also looks quite a bit like a banjo, a pie plate, or maybe even a tambourine). . .

. . . whereas Harold is just a scared little man trying not to die, a tiny surreal black figure swinging for his life. Is Lang's vision Harold turned inside-out or fed through the evil machinery of his imagination? Does Metropolis reflect the "mechanical" quality some critics claimed detracted from Lloyd's work? Are the cogs and flywheels that endlessly whirred in Harold's mind making themselves manifest in this horrorscape? Or is the whole thing just a big fat coincidence?

We'll never know now.

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Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

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

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

Edward Snowden: fancy dancer?

This is the boy that talks and talks (and talks).

At first you think you're dealing with a high school kid, like in that movie, what was it called, Catch Me If You Can. He's sort of cute and unshaven, yet not unkempt, so he appeals to a wide spectrum of people. He comes across well.

It could be argued that he's only acting to expose a glaring social wrong that should have been addressed back in George Orwell's glory days. Like the frog in warm water that is gradually boiled, we have been anaesthetized by the religion or drug of galloping consumerism and the near-total dominance of technology. It's not that we don't care - we don't even notice any more that everything we say, think, eat, sleep or do is being monitored and manipulated ALL THE TIME.

It's just possible that somebody has to make us care.

But heroes have flaws. This guy, I swear to you - and this is purely intuitive - there's something wrong here, something "off", or at very least something so highly orchestrated that it bothers me. It takes a lot of work to appear so sincere, so articulate, so relatively casual. Not a trace of ranting or raving. But I think the truth is that he craves and even requires this sort of global attention to survive.

There is no way in the world Snowden could have done this phenomenal whistle-blowing all by himself: he would need a global network of assistants, accomplices, whatever. So why is he speaking as if he alone knew how to access a buried trove of forbidden information, taking a life-threatening risk in bringing it all to light?

Isn't he playing into the American ideal of the solitary hero, the lone cowboy who doesn't need anybody's help because needing help is WEAK?

Is he on "our side" or not? What exactly IS "our side", and why are so many right-wing pundits pounding their pulpits and denouncing him as some sort of devil-worshipping-pro-gun-control nut case?

What is it about him, besides the odd-sounding British name and the feeling he has dive-bombed down from out of nowhere? It's the eyes. They shift and shift. Is he just nervous? Why does the calm correct voice not match the face?

This is why I posted the gif, to illustrate the discrepancy. What can it mean?

My sense is that it will all come out over the next few weeks or months, and the truth will be layered and convoluted. Lots of people think he will be killed, but the truth is he wants us to think that. And when it comes to the movie deal, he can write his own cheque. Mission accomplished?

Oh, and. . . don't they say you can judge a man by the company he keeps?

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

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

Can you see. . . in 3D?

And so say all of us.