Did somebody mention George?

I dreamed I was in a movie with George Clooney.

He was very well-dressed and impeccable through the whole movie and had a Cary Grant manner about him. Through the whole movie I felt this longing for him, wanted to kiss and make out with him,  but at the same time I looked on him as a prize Arabian horse or something, just unattainable.

I was both in a movie with him, and watching a movie with him in it. Some parts of the dream were in a movie theatre and I remember trying to snuggle up to him. I wanted everyone to see that I was with George Clooney and he was snuggling up to me. He allowed this, then seemed to sort of lose interest.

I didn’t have too many clothes on during this and was maybe in my late 20s. The movie (an art house film) involved Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson in Mad Men) who was a poor struggling harpist living in a garret. I remember seeing her in one scene very badly miming harp playing, with awful out-of-tune music, and wondering why they hadn’t tried harder to make it seem convincing.

It became obvious as the dream went on that I WAS the Peggy Olson character and was both watching her in the movie, which seemed to take place in an old apartment house with winding staircases in Europe, and BEING her in the movie. I was also somehow sitting with George Clooney in the audience.  He did not seem to like the movie, and as I kept on draping myself over him, it also became apparent he was bored. There was some sort of play-within-a-play happening in the movie that involved Elizabeth Moss, some gorgeous European scenes (? I think), and other famous actors who now escape me. I looked down and noticed I had very hairy legs, and so did the Elisabeth Moss character. George Clooney was now frankly bored by the movie which did not seem to have a point to it. He said “Let’s get out of here” and we left, and I grabbed his hand which he didn’t seem to want.  I hoped as we left that people in the theatre would notice I was with George Clooney, though I continued to worry about my hairy legs.

Similarly to the old apartment building in the movie, the theatre also had very elaborate winding staircases with windows at each landing. I said “Let’s play a Dorothy Parker game.” I grabbed his hand and we began to run up the stairs. When we got to a  window I’d look out at the view and say, “Is this a good place to jump?” Then we’d run up another level. I was disappointed there were only a couple more levels, but then we burst out onto a sort of balcony. The view was mostly obscured by some sort of black-painted glass barrier, but George wiped off a bit of condensation and I could see through it. I just began to gasp at how beautiful it was: snow-peaked mountains, glaciers, blazing-white snow sparkling everywhere. “Oh, it’s just like Alberta,” I sighed. “Switzerland,” George said, by now very bored with me and testy, probably staying just to be polite.

In another scene I was trying to make my way through a maze of corridors (in the movie apartment, not the theatre) which at one point led to a convenience store. I bought two enormous bags of popcorn and felt guilty about it, but it was so cheap, two for one!  I blundered around trying to find my way back. When I finally found George, he was totally annoyed and said, “Don’t you ever go anywhere?” I tried to tell him I had no sense of direction and got lost in restaurants coming back from the ladies’ room. (I didn’t have the popcorn any more.)

Other parts of the dream have already got lost or muddled. One involved Catherine Zeta-Jones who had a very short skirt on. At one point I pointed out to George (who was barely with me by now) that she had no panties on, and he took a look. Renee Zellwegger was there but I don’t know what she was doing. I think Robert Downey Jr. was in it. I had the thought that celebrities just had to stand around to be impressive. At one point I felt like I was in that old Disney cartoon, Mickey’s Gala Premier, in which every celebrity of the day appeared. I still wasn’t quite sure if I was IN the movie or just watching it, but I definitely felt outclassed.

I don’t know if this scene is related or not. It involves bugs, an infestation of them. They were crawling out from a crack in the baseboards which had huge gaps in it. Some of them were enormous cockroaches which made me want to scream. I didn’t know how to get rid of these bugs and ended up spraying very heavily out of a can all along the baseboards (and there weren’t really any baseboards, just wall and floor with big holes and gaps). The bugs retreated quickly, including the cockroaches, and at one point I tried to crunch one under my foot and couldn’t kill it. I knew they would be back.

Another scene (related somehow) had the theatre manager talking to a lot of audience members out in the lobby. He was going on and on about American Presidents. This is garbled in my memory, but the gist was we should be proud and fascinated by how many Presidents had been represented in movies that had played in that particular theatre. At one point he said, very proudly, “We’ve even had an assassination.” The audience was waiting around for some sort of bonus or prize, but I don’t think it ever happened.

I don’t know what happened to George Clooney.

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Nick: you make me sick

This is an actual transcript, word-for-word, of a horrific bucket of swill that just appeared in my inbox. I'm still trying to believe it happened, and decided to address it right away before my fury abated. My comments follow Nick's nice intimate little message.

Hi Margaret,

You know better than most that putting your writing "out there" takes a tremendous amount of courage; readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes. At Grammarly we know the feeling - and we've made it our mission to improve writers' confidence. Putting our money where our mouth is, we'd be honored to sponsor your next blog post with a $20 Amazon gift card.

In case you haven’t heard of us, Grammarly is an automated online proofreader that finds and explains those pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that are bound to find their way into your first draft. Think of us as a second pair of digital eyes that can spare you the cost of hiring a proofreader. If you'd like to join our 3 million users and try the premium version of our proofreader for free, let me know and I'll make it happen!

Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time.

Cheers,
Nick

P.S. Let me know if you ever find yourself in foggy San Francisco; I’d love to grab some coffee. :)

I have no idea what-the-fuck this is, or even if it's on the level. It may well be a hoax perpetrated by that old Gandalfian wag, Matt Paust. But I have a queasy feeling that it's real. 

I don't even know where to begin! "Hi Margaret" is a good start: who ARE these people, and why do they feel so completely confident to address me as if I'm an old friend? But it gets worse. That first sentence offends me in the way that only patronizing, ignorant bullshit can offend me. "You know better than most" is meant to massage my brilliant writer's ego: oh, we know you've been there, you've taken your lumps. "Putting your writing 'out there' takes a tremendous amount of courage." No it doesn't. I have no courage whatsoever, and I've been "putting it out there" since I was eight and hand-wrote ten copies of my first novel for my friends and relatives. It's a little like saying to a woman, "You know, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to wear that dress."

"Readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes"? What universe does this asshole live in? My blog receives relatively few comments (except the 43 I got for the "I See Dead People" post that garnered over 73,000 views), and since Matt makes most of them, he knows better than to pick at my  "pesky" grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes, not that I make any. (Or hardly any.) But it seems their mandate is to "improve writers' confidence" by helping them spray toxic chemicals on those squirmy little errors and wipe them out. 

This Grammarly thingamabob, whatever it is, is supposed to save me "the cost of hiring a proofreader". I have published two novels which received almost universally positive, even glowing reviews, so do you think I need a fucking PROOFREADER? This sort of invasive, mind-polluting trash is just what makes the internet such a dismal swamp, when it could be so much more. But Mr. or Ms. Patronizing Asshole saves the "best" till last. "Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time." 

OK, Nick or whoever-the-hell-you-really-are, THIS is my "next appropriate blog post" and I hope you see it! And I would LOVE to see what would happen if I tried to hunt you down in San Francisco so we could "grab some coffee :) " My personal theory is that you don't exist, that you are in fact a corporate mirage, an evil and impersonal force out to squeeze the impoverished blogger dry of his or her last few dollars. 

From the first fake, cheery "Hi, Margaret!" to that last noisome verbal oilslick about "grabbing a coffee", this thing sucks like a vampire with 100 insatiable mouths. It has the fixed, sociopathic grin of a Great White shark moving in for the kill.

But hey, Nick baby, if you'd send me that gift card for $20, maybe I could afford a few ropes, whips and chains and a box of condoms for my next trip to San Francisco. 

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Blueberry Butt!

Charge of the Light Brigade: Take 2

De Jarge of de Light Brigade

by William F. Kirk ("The Norsk Nightingale")

(NOTE: William F. Kirk , The Norsk Nightingale, was a 19th-century dialect poet world-famous for his "lumberyack" poetry, best represented by Sonnet on Stewed Prunes ("By yiminy! Dey ban gude"). One of his oevres was satirizing famous poetry, including the "half a league, half a league" refrain of Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. At least I think it was Tennyson. . . I always used to call him Alfred Lord Tennis Ball. Anyway, try reading this aloud in the home furnishings section of Ikea, and see what happens!)

Yoyfully, yoyfully, Yoyfully onvard,

In dis har walley of death Rode the sax hundred!

It ban a cinch, ay tenk, 

 Some geezer blundered.

 "Hustle, yu Light Brigade! Yump!" Maester Olson said;

 Den in the walley of death

 Go the sax hundred. 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on left of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered; 

Smashed vith dis shot and shal, 

Dey ant do wery val; 

Most of dem ketching hal,— 

 Nearly sax hundred! 

Yes, all dem sabres bare 

Flash purty gude in air; 

Each faller feel his hair Standing. No vonder! 

Yudas! It ant ban yob 

For any coward slob, 

Fighting dis Russian mob. 

Ay tenk ay vudn't stand Yeneral's blunder.

 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

Cannon behind dem, tu, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered. 

Finally say Captain Brenk, 

"Ve got enuff, ay tenk,

 Let's go and getting drenk."

 'Bout tventy-sax com back 

 Out of sax hundred.

Ven skol deir glory fade?

 It ban gude charge dey made, 

 Every von vondered. 

Every von feeling blue, 

'Cause dey ban brave old crew, 

Yolly gude fallers, tu, 

 Dis har sax hundred!

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Full prively he caught her by the queint: torn from the pages of Facebook

High, dizzy and brand new!

Welcome to the New Look. Well, sort of. I was just tired of the old title which most people didn't understand, as it was meant as a sort of satire of Barbie's House of Dreams (and all the other kittenish, puppyish, glittery-type-things I SOOOO often see on the internet). They thought I was merely lame and took shots at me. One even called my blog "embarrassing". Oh dear.

So today, on a whim, I changed it up, changed the title too, and am mixed up as hell because older posts still seem to want to come out in a House of Dreamy sort of way. But hopefully I'll soon get the bugs out.

I'm sticking to this simple template now because there is nothing I LOATHE more than a web site I can't navigate, with "things" popping up all over the place and rolls of photos dizzily sliding along when you don't want them to. I don't like tricks. I want accessible. As it is, I wasn't able to get all the text just where I wanted it to be, but this will do for now.

I do get tired of that "iconic" picture of Harold 'angin' about on the clock, and felt that this one had a little more scope. It is one of the VERY few high-res pictures I can find of Lloyd - most are small and smudgy. I also like Mildred Davis' somewhat submissive posture. I believe this came from an early Lloyd pic called High and Dizzy.

And the title, well, it's the same title as my forthcoming novel. Almost everyone else referred to Lloyd's screen persona as the "glasses character", but for reasons that were never clear, Lloyd himself always talked about his "glass character" and even "glass pictures", which I think is indescribably poetic. For that I thank him, for it's a great title and much nicer than The Glasses Character.

Will this blog be about Lloyd and nothing else? You know it won't. It will probably have the same freaky, uneven history of 23 views for one post, and 73, 496 for another (no kidding, look it up, it's called I See Dead People: Victorian Post-Mortem Photography, and it got more exposure than I've probably had in my entire writer's life). Since I can't seem to please anyone, and since freakish events like that one are rare, I'll continue to please myself.

I thought it was a good idea to stick my name on the title of my blog for publicity, and now it feels a little lame and never got me anywhere, anyway. So I'll use the title of my novel instead. Coming soon. To a bookshelf/Kindle near you.

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Weinerdance: Anthony Weiner gets down!

It's late, and I want to go to bed, but that's when the gif-monster strikes. A two-minute YouTube clip of Anthony Weiner, who may just be the most repulsive human being I have ever seen, yielded so many rich gif moments that I had to pick and choose. In this one he demonstrates some strange new dance step, the Sexting Shuffle, perhaps.

One of the Weenie-man's favorite gestures - pointing fingers! Remember, Tony. When you point a finger at someone, four fingers point back at you. Or whatever. 

That's tellin' em', Tony! That's righteous moral indignation! That's exposing hypocrisy, corruption and lies! That's taking a stand for truth, honesty and the American Way!

No! I WON'T clean up my room! I WON'T eat my spinach! I WON'T stop sexting, I WON'T!

Eat, pray, LOVE that Tony Weiner.

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Harold Lloyd: it's cartoon time!

This is a Mickey Mouse cartoon about a polo match, with a ragtag assortment of celebrity caricatures cavorting around. Unfortunately we only get to see Harold in the stands (bottom left), but he's right there beside W. C. Fields and (presumably) Greta Garbo. In the back row, Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, and Eddie Cantor, known on radio as Banjo Eyes.

Was the original in colour? I doubt it. They didn't make them back then. Someone must have colorized it somewhere along the line. BTW, I don't think Harold ever wore a red bow tie. Interesting that he wears gloves: a horrific hand injury forced him to wear a prosthetic glove on camera.

Here he's singing in a chorus in Mickey's Gala Premiere, which features dozens of "stars" doing all sorts of wacky things. Looks like Clark Gable on the right, with Edward G. Robinson and - ? - Adolphe Menjou? - in the front row. Help me here.

A funny little thing I found on YouTube, an animated trailer for Harold's last silent picture, Speedy. Wish I could see more of him, but isn't that always the case?

Congratulations, Mickey!

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Peotry Korner: Paradise Lost

(Taken from an actual review on Amazon.com.)

Paradise Lost: Boring Peotry.

Planes, trains and rollercoasters: how Harold gets around

Sonnet on Stewed Prunes (by the Norsk Nightingale)

Sonnet On Stewed Prunes

By William F. Kirk


Ay ant lak pie-plant pie so wery vell;

Ven ay skol eat ice-cream, my yaws du ache;

Ay ant much stuck on dis har yohnnie-cake

Or crackers yust so dry sum peanut shell.

And ven ay eat dried apples, ay skol svell

Until ay tenk my belt skol nearly break;

And dis har breakfast food, ay tenk, ban fake:

Yim Dumps ban boosting it, so it skol sell.

But ay tal yu, ef yu vant someteng fine,

Someteng so sveet lak wery sveetest honey,

Vith yuice dat taste about lak nice port vine,

Only it ant cost hardly any money, - 

Ef yu vant someteng yust lak anyel fude,

Yu try stewed prunes. By yiminy! dey ban gude.

Turbo Snails and Mochi-knitting

There's some kind-of-a movie coming out about snails. Damned if I know anything about it, but I know my granddaughters, sweet little blue-eyed blondies with bouncy hair, LOVE snails and will probably go see it.

They love slithery, antennae-y, slime-trail-leaving snails, which they keep outside in the backyard in a sort of plastic box which serves as a snail ranch. Every so often Daddy shakes it out over the garden, and the snail-collecting starts all over again.

Snails this size are surprisingly easy to knit, though I had to refresh myself on the Magic Loop method which essentially knits a tube that doesn't require seaming. I could never knit on four needles to save my life.

The hardest part, of course, were the antennae, which had to be knitted as i-cords. It was only recently that I discovered this stands for "idiot cord". It's a way of getting around the four needles, I guess. There is snobbery and elitism in knitting as in everything else, and the four-needle, double-pointed crowd often looks down on those poor sods who only use two. Never mind, I just wanted to get the job done.

This is the original mega-snail I knitted for Erica, who must be 9 or 10 inches long. The pattern is out of a book of knitted amigurumi, but this one is atypical. Amigurumi are usually tiny, crocheted, and represent imaginary creatures. This one was honkin' huge and nearly impossible to knit. Surprisingly, the shell was relatively easy because it involved relentless decreases that pulled the tube into a curled ram's-horn shape.

The body, however. . . the instructions were woefully inadequate, only two pages, with NO illustrations. The patterns I frequently order on the net often run to twenty pages, with instructional photos on every page. So it's a wonder I completed this project at all. Having done the shell, however, I knew I couldn't stop, so I made up my own body which was more of a beanbag, stuffing it with plastic shot to give it stability. The plastic shot slowly leaked out of tiny holes in the body, however, necessitating a major repair job.


http://mochimochiland.com/2008/03/free-pattern-snails-and-slugs/

This is a link to the pattern on a charming site called Mochimochi Land. I approve, except I altered the pattern a bit (as I usually do), making the end of the snail shell a bit narrower (they're hard to curl under) and correcting a problem with the eyes.

Snails' eyes aren't placed the way they are here. They're on the ends of their icky, probing, viscous antennae.
The way the antennae look here, they're more like bunny ears. I made mine longer, with a bit of a blob on the ends so I could embroider on eyes.

The kids would never forgive me if these things were inaccurate.

(This doesn't look much like a real snail either. The movie I was talking about is called Turbo and it's about some sort of snail race. Actually, for their size, snails aren't slow. We've had the experience of looking at a snail in the back yard, going away for a few minutes, and coming back only to find it several feet away. All that determined slime-gliding must pay off.)

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My God. . . what's that in your pocket?

No, it's not the cute little green Geico Gecko with his Australian accent and ironic humour. It isn't the Aflac Duck, who seems to have broken a wing lately or something (but he only had one line anyway).

This is some sort of nightmarish mechanical squirrel that hands out pills.

Pink pills, Pepto-Dismal pills (as we used to call it). If they taste as sickish and paintlike as the original sickish pink liquid, then they'll make you throw up, which is one way I guess of relieving your stomach problems.

I heard once that during the war (and to my generation, The War meant only one thing) people used Pepto-Bismal as paint in a pinch, when nothing else was available. This tells me several things. One, that there must have been buckets of it lying around (why would it cost less than paint, or be more available?) Two, that there must have been a lot of sickish pink walls during the war. Three, that I think I'm going to be sick now.

And hey, waitaminute: the Pepto part I get, but Bismol? Does this stuff have bismuth in it? What the hell IS bismuth - isn't it radiactive, like Strontium 90? What's Strontium 90? Is that why it's pink?

(below. . . I hate to do this. . . I found out some facts about the bismuth, but could only post these few because I can't think about this any more.  I'm surprised this stuff hasn't been hauled off the market by the FDA.)

Dissolved Pills Mike Walker

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Most modern medicines are carefully synthesized organic molecules so potent that each pill contains only a few milligrams of the active ingredient. Pepto-Bismol is a fascinating exception, both because its active ingredient is bismuth, a heavy metal commonly used in shotgun pellets, and because there is a lot of it in each dose. So much, in fact, that I was able to extract a slug of bismuth metal from a pile of pink pills.

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