I've gone Blingee!

For a long time, before I even knew what a gif was or figured any of that out, there were these sparkly things that you could find on the internet. Sparkly like old greeting cards with that sandlike stuff stuck to them. Mostly they were puppies and kittens and things. I hated them.

When I was swallowed up by the enchantment of the World of Gif, I turned disdainfully away from sparklies. To hell with them! I was a Giffinator now. That is, until my favorite gif site just pulled the plug on me. It doesn't work for shit now and turns out these small stretched uglies that I won't post.

While throwing together bad valentine verses that turned into a dissertation on writer's groups and why I hate them, I wanted to illustrate my points (and break up monotonous blocks of text, which is the main reason I use images) with tacky Valentine sentiments. It wasn't hard to find them. Nearly all of them, the really tacky ones anyway, were Blingees.

Something had happened in the interim, and now these were interesting. Tawdry, most of them, but in a good way. Some of them were wildly creative, just flashing with crazy energy. The animation had improved substantially to allow dancing figures and even, in one case, a walking one.

The hunt was on! I wanted to find them ALL. I wanted Bigfoot, I wanted Bob Dylan, I wanted William Shatner, Jesus, and everything else. What really triggered this search was a Blingee of a squirrel with a bottle of Jack Daniels beside it. WTFFF? It was so nonsensical, so incomprehensible, it was beautiful.

Blingees have been taken over by the cool element, the gangstas, though there are still lots of glittering ponies and bleeding Christs. Jesus probably accounts for 85% of Blingee images, a sort of modern update of the old lenticular pictures that flashed back and forth between the Crucifixion and the Last Supper.

I confess that I lost my virginity not long ago and Blingee-d the cover of The Glass Character (which I am not quite allowed to show you yet, but it's a doozie!). I had to keep the blings to one side to avoid covering Harold's face -  but strangely enough, at the bottom of the cover, the author's name turns out as Margaret Blingee.

I like that. It could be a pseudonym. I could at last be Cool. Margaret Blingee could wear things that Margaret Gunning couldn't get away with. Margaret Blingee could write cool things and win swell prizes. It would be a different life.

Puppy, don't chase that squirrel! "Dis muh nutz, you can't have em!"

Beautiful images that evoke Bob Dylan. Note the walking cat, and the angel perched on the roof playing a violin that releases a cascade of gold shimmers. The second one is Slow Train Coming.

Just beautiful.

 "For dinner, we're having moose chili and caribou hot dogs!"

I assume this cat is dead.

Uhhh. . . 

Blinged out.

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

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

Valentine poems: an arrow in the heart

Valentine, O, Valentine / I'll be your love and you'll be mine,

We'll care for each other, rain or fine / and in 90 years we'll be 99.

-Ian Serraillier

If you won't be my Valentine / I'll scream, I'll yell, I'll bite.

I'll cry aloud, I'll start to whine / If you won't be my Valentine.

-Myra Cohn Livingston

Plenty of Love / Tons of kisses

Hope some day / To be your Mrs.

-Author Unknown

My love is like a cabbage / Divided into two

The leaves I give to others / The heart I give to you.

-Author Unknown

Valentines is near / Just wishing you were here

You will always be near / My heart will never be the same

-Jose Villalpando

Are we friends, Are we not / You told me once, but I forgot.

So tell me now and tell me true / So I can say I'm here with you.

-Author Unknown

Raindrops on our dresses / Sunshine on our face,

No matter what the weather / The look of love won't be replaced.

-Donna Wallace

I was lonely, sad, and blue / until the day that I meet you.

You came into my life and changed it around / turned my frown upside down.

-Author Unknown

To see my darling on his special day / Would put two Valentine wishes at bay.

Happy Birthday to him is the Valentine for me / Then two hearts once again get to share ecstasy.

-Lisa D. Myers

Someone asked me to name the time / Of when our love became sublime.

I searched high and low but could not find / It within the vast regions of my mind.

So now as I close it is time / Would please be my Valentine.

-Author Unknown

There's nothing in this world / That can express my love

You're as beautiful as an angel / And pure as a dove.

-Osman Espinoza

I searched high and low (as in one of the poems, above) to find Valentine poetry that is not terrifically bad (some of it is gross or obscene, which just does not do it for me), but truly mediocre. This is poetry with good intentions, poetry that doesn't KNOW it's bad. It's the Stairway to Stardom of Valentine verse, not quite rhyming, not quite NOT rhyming, with meter (if there is any) that is all over the place.

This collection appeared along with snippets by Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker ("one perfect rose"), which of course had to go. Some of these are by "known" writers, even known poets, which amazes me. The Florence Foster Jenkins of verse, perhaps?


I remember my crazy brother Arthur and I having a bad poetry contest which we called Peotry Korner. "Hey, that's spelled wrong!" one of our friends exclaimed. We were so dumb, and he needed to point that out! I think I may have won the contest with this:


"When skies R grey
and it precipitates
You remind me
of a load of wet hay.
Happy Doomsday -
glad you're not here."

I was briefly part of a truly hair-raising "writer's group" called Women and Words, in which the main goal seemed to be not writing by a variety of means. We drank sangria, we talked about our kids and household products, and then someone came up with an idea for fundraising: not an anthology of our writing, but a COOKBOOK! I noticed the group had a "poetry expert", a little old lady with her hair in a bun and a print dress, as if someone had rocketed back in time to the 1950s to collect her. "Doris is our poetry expert," someone said, and Doris colored, saying, "Oh no no no no no."


Several times I heard statements from people like, "I just can't stand all that modern poetry. It doesn't even rhyme." Sooner or later someone had to get up to recite. The poems were not unlike the examples above (and I'm sorry I'm sounding so mean - I know I am - but this was just so frustrating for me, as I'd had high hopes for the group helping to dig me out of the landslide of loneliness I was trapped in).


"Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky
Every time I see you I wonder why
Why you lift your wings and fly so high
Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky"


The standard response to a poetry reading was, to a person, "Oh that's LOVE-ly!". I wondered if that really passed for a critique. By this time I was afraid to get up and read my own self-absorbed laments, most written in abstract form.  I just now realized that a version of this gathering found its way into my first novel, Better than Life, in which a Christlike, charismatic stranger named Bob attempts to initiate the good ladies of Harman into the mysteries of Yeats and Kahlil Gibran.

I went to two sessions of this group, and at the second one it looked as if we had attracted some actual writers (and one of the ladies outright admitted, "Oh, I don't really do any writing, I just come along for the social part"). One fiercely beautiful black woman got up and cast webs of fire over the room, after which there was dead silence.


"Well," said the old lady expert.


"Keep working on it," said Bev, the unofficial matriarch (unofficial, my ass - everything she said was law!). The writer looked distinctly uncomfortable. Another writer had built the substructure for a play, showing a definite talent for discernment - what doesn't need to be there, in other words - thus constructing the foundation for a major work.


Not much comment there, either.

At a certain point, when I made the embarrassing admission I'd written a novel (a truly bad novel, though at the time I thought it was pretty good), someone exclaimed, "Oh, are you Margaret Gunn?" I wanted to say "ING". I had a weekly column in the local paper then, but it seemed she had only managed to read half of it. Another woman asked me, "What's the conflict?", something straight out of Writers Group 101. Obviously, it was the thing to say, the question to ask to show that you understood, that you Knew. I still don't know what it meant.

Oh, but I do remember one actual exercise - we were supposed to take a pen and paper and write down the name of our character, then write down EVERYTHING we could think of about them. There was even a questionnaire. Where they were born, when they were born, who their parents were, what they looked like, their shoe size, and blah blah blah blah blah. It was only later that I realized that trudging through writing a novel would be intolerable if you already knew everything. It's the finding out that is the thing. And if it doesn't interest you - fascinate you, in fact - then it sure as hell will not interest the reader.


Where is all this coming from? There's nothing wrong with drinking sangria and exclaiming "oh, that's lovely!" after every poem. But in a way, "writer's group" is a contradiction in terms. In my experience, giving yourself to the process is often horrendously lonely, to the point that I understand why so many poets commit suicide.
 

I don't know why I've done this for so many years, except that I'm not good at anything else. No, I mean it, or at least not anything I can do professionally. I haven't had anyone refer to my work as a "nice hobby" for a while now, maybe because they've given up talking to me altogether.


People fall away. They lose interest, or find they can't do it, bury their ambition where it festers and ruins their lives. I become sick of halting myself, to keep pace with their faux interest/dedication. They just stop, or they make themselves stop. I had a friend exclaim, when I made a friendly suggestion that she try keeping a blog, "What would I write about?" But it was her facial expression that cut me: baffled, as if I'd said "why don't you start a worm farm"; offended, as if I'd said "why don't you have an affair with your neighbor"; disgusted, as if I'd said "why don't you shovel shit for a living." And even at that, there was an aspect to her reaction that I can't describe, a mouthful of vinegar or something else awful, with her tone of voice full of "whaaaaat?" Not just incredulous, but ferociously judgemental. It was casting her own insecurity and frustrated ambition back in my face, not unlike the cobra-strike ploys used by my sister for years and years.

I had obviously said the wrong thing. But she had no idea why her reaction bothered me, which was even worse. That friendship died in a torrent of bile which made me realize her ambition had long ago been interred and was sending up noxious fumes of decay.


OK, I never expected to go on and on like this. Are there "real" writers" then, to be divided from the dabblers like the sheep from the goats? YES. Does this have anything to do with money or prestige or even getting widely published and becoming some sort of quasi-celebrity like that bitch who wrote Fifty Shades? Of course not.


It has to do with dedication, but it's something else. Painful as all this is, you can't live without it. I find I replicate my initial experiences of utter obscurity again and again, and the chances of this changing at my age are extremely slim. But I've come to realize that if I needed recognition, I would have quit long ago. Keeping on with it at this level of intensity would have been impossible. So it's something else that drives me, and, I suspect, almost every other writer.

I don't always like what I do. It's kind of like being married. Habit? Not quite. Just a need, something I can't describe or even get away from. It galloped away with me a very long time ago.


A long long long time ago when I was seeing a therapist, I was also listening (incessantly) to k. d. lang's brilliant Ingenue album (which I have started listening to again). I was talking to her about a certain song, how I felt it was much more than a love song.


"Why do you say that?"


I wasn't sure what I was saying.


"I think it's about her work. You know. . . not so much the singing as the writing."

I often wonder

is it so

All I am holding

wants let go

How could I manage

I don't know

I often question

Is it so

Life's contradictions

tend to grow

Spawning the choices

and the woe

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

I often wonder

Is it so

Lessons of patience

are learned slow

Earnings of labour

may never show

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

k. d. lang

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

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

Gorgeously good

Mangled by media

The media fascinate me, and horrify me. (And it's plural, folks. One medium; two media. But it doesn't apply to those psychic dudes, for some reason.) I'm closer to the subject than most people: I have a daughter who's an award-winning reporter with CTV News, and even after a dozen years I feel immensely proud to see her on the air (and I will still say to my husband, if he's out of the room, "Hey, Shannon's on!")

One of the things we both do is watch all the newsmagazines: Dateline NBC, 20-20, 48 Hours. I'm always interested in her take on these things and how they're covered: she often catches things I miss.  The stories can be lurid and sometimes (as in the case of mass/child murder) too extreme for me to watch. But Shannon always watches, with the eagle eye of the insider.

But there's another aspect to this, quite apart from the stories themselves. It's how they're covered, the spin they're given (and believe me, there's always a spin). And as Shannon has often told me, this is inextricably bound up in the personalities behind the news.

Some 50 years ago, communications guru Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message," and if we never hear that statement any more, it's because we're frogs in hot water, not feeling the temperature gradually rising as we come closer and closer to being boiled.  The public is never consciously aware of this, either, but personality is also the message, or at least it trumps content every time. Far from being mere delivery devices, these strangely compelling men and women often seem to be the whole point of turning on the TV.

My daughter's favorite reporter is the craggy, canny Keith Morrison, an ex-pat Canadian whom she describes as a brilliant storyteller. He's an old-style journalist, long and lean, his face seamed with wrinkles, his hair falling down in a floppy silver forelock. In spite of the wrinkles, he seems ageless, gangly like a teenager and dressed in youthful clothing that never seems incongruous. His delivery is unusual too, almost exaggerated, his voice sometimes dropping to a whisper as he describes the hideous domestic murders that seem to make up 85% of the show. But he gets away with it, makes it work. It's his style and he's comfortable with it, plain-spoken but not quite folksy, low-key, intense and hard to get away from. 

Compelling television. The Keith Morrison Show.

But his lean, striding, casually-tossed-mustang-mane'd delivery is far from the norm. Some reporters are so tensely-wound that you can almost see the key in their back. They appear shiny, their teeth gleaming and their hair perfect behind a bulletproof, plexiglass shield. But we're not buying it, not falling for their invincibility. The consumer/viewer probes, poking around for vulnerability, feasting on it while we pretend to be sympathetic. 

We aren't. Not really. Mostly, we're just hungry.

Not long ago, the diminutive, deceptively-smooth Elizabeth Vargas came on 20-20 and talked about her decades of alcoholic drinking and her (harrowingly short, I felt) stint in rehab, but she looked tense and very uncomfortable, and at one point said she was only doing this because the press had already “outed” her. Otherwise she would have kept it private. 

Then there was that utter disaster on The View – and what’s Barbara Walters doing on TV, anyway, when she “retired” a couple of years ago and is now doddering around in her 80s? – when Walters said, “Oh, we knew about it, all right. We all knew.” Vargas just looked mortified and offended and shocked. In the name of spontaneous live television, pandering to the grand old bitch of TV, she had been swiftly and ruthlessly ambushed. 

Vargas drank heavily for years and years, assuming she was hiding it from her colleagues, and (in a twist of irony) did FIVE stories on 20-20 about alcoholism, including how it affects women and even mothers. All the while, she was a mother dangerously drinking and being secretive about it (though as Barbara Walters gleefully pointed out to her on live TV, they were on to her all the time). 

Of course there had to be backstory about her anxiety disorder, her separation from her father who was in the military (though I kept expecting them to say he had died). There had to be. Addiction is almost as bad as mental illness in demanding “WHY?”. You can’t just have it. Something has to have damaged you into it, really badly, or else you'd be normal like the rest of us. Right? 

Where’s the weakness, where’s the flaw? The public jabs and probes like a dentist attacking a rotten tooth, while the object of all this drilling hopes desperately they'll garner some sympathy from it, not pity and contempt. But it’s always a mixture, because people love to feel superior to those in the limelight. Build them up, knock them down.  

But that's nothing compared to the extent that these "journalists" can be vicious to their own kind, consuming them with a carnivore's gusto in full view of the watching public.

I hesitate to get into the bloodbath of Ann Curry being ripped out of her job on the Today show, the siege led by Matt Lauer who did the world's worst impersonation of a warm sendoff.  Rumor has it that she had been subjected to every sort of humiliation imagineable, while at the same time being assured everyone was just thrilled to have her on-board. Thus if she felt bad about what was happening to her, if she thought she had to run run run to keep from going backwards as the rug was steadily pulled out from under her, she was just too sensitive and should man up.

Her sendoff was nothing like the usual "it's been great, but it's time to move on to new blah, blah, blah" that we usually hear. To everyone's profound discomfort, she began to whimper and cry and endlessly rattle on in what began to sound almost like an apology for her career. I've seen Ann Curry's work, and it does seem a trifle too vulnerable for comfort, just a little "off", though I can't put my finger on why. She wants to be my Mommy, and I won't have it - or, worse, she wants ME to be HER Mommy. The slaughter was jokingly referred to behind the scenes as Operation Bambi, though I think Curry ended up being more like Bambi's mother. 

(Note: I decided to find a YouTube video of her now-infamous exit scene, and it was horrendous to watch, one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. It was like listening to a narcissistic actress winning her first Oscar and refusing to be "played off", or a teenage girl with galloping PMS, with just a bit of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz: "I think I'll miss you most of all." I was going to try to make one of my famous gifs of her wiping away her tears, but it was too much, I had to turn it off.)

The more I read about this boiling swamp of piranha, the more I want to turn my TV off forever. . . except that I can't. I'm just as hooked as anyone else. Though reality TV loves tears and snot and shoving the camera up the subject's nose, the TV newsmagazines still seem to demand the plexiglass front that kept Elizabeth Vargas trapped in her alcoholism for so many years.

Not too emotional, please. But not cold! No one will be able to identify with you! And you can't have a speech impediment, for God's sake, unless you're that famous museum piece from Madame Tussaud's, Baba Wawa. No wrinkles, you'll look old, but it's OK, even endearing on Keith Morrison. Reveal your flaws and failures, make those fatal "admissions" about horrendous things like alcoholism and mental illness, but be aware it will be a black mark on your record forever, and that whenever people hear your name, that's the first and perhaps the only thing about you that they will ever remember.

I think I'd drink too.

(BLOGGER'S COMPLAINT. Since they're so goldern fun to make, and since my reading audience is so minuscule I might as well do whatever I gosh-darn please, gifs have almost taken over this labor of love that I call my Blog. When I discovered Gifsforum, I began to turn cartwheels of joy. It was not only easy to use, but had a fantastic array of options: size, speed, forward or backward, a dozen different filters/effects, the option of compressing frames so that the gif moved like a silent film, even incremental reductions of color that turned them into superb moving paintings.

NOW IT'S ALL TO SHIT. I mean it. All. To. Shit. I go on the site to do my usual fun fiddling around, and whoooshh, it's all gone now except the most basic gif-making, with NO flexibility at all. All those features have been removed. The gifs cook up very swiftly now, but so what? They also look like shit. The large ones once had an almost 3D clarity to them, especially old black-and-white ones of my beloved Harold Lloyd movies. Now you get one size only, kind of a mediocre medium. I can't choose the option of making them smaller to embed in emails and in my posts. Not only that, I was horrified to discover that the ratio is "off" and they look distorted, vertically stretched! I'd go back to the one I started with, Y2GIF, but it doesn't work at all any more. You sit there while that little goddamn thingamabob swirls around and around and NOTHING happens. And your brilliant little gif doesn't exist because you are tired of waiting for it.

Worst of all is the way they describe their primitive gif-making gizmo: "NEW!" Oh yeah, it's new, all right! It's a piece of shit! They're bragging about it being new and improved, when 90% of the capacity of the thing is shot all to hell! So what's the point?  I might as well DRAW my bloody gifs and nudge them with my fingers and hope they will move.)

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

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

Silent screams in space

(From YouTube notes about Lost Cosmonaut video, posted above):

This is a supposed recording of a Soviet space flight in 1961. In it, a Russian woman can be heard complaining about the increasing temperature inside the craft before it is destroyed attempting re-entry.

This was recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1961. It is reportedly one of many transmissions intercepted by the two brothers that prove the existence of the lost cosmonauts.

The following is a translation of what the woman is saying:

five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...
come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN!
COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?...
FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...
BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS?
WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT...
I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT...
... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A
FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO...
THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

OK, gentle readers. So what's my take on all this? I found this eerie recording on a Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings (from a site called Top 10 Lists of. . .), and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I couldn't even get to sleep last night, it creeped me out so much.

Way leads on to way, and I found much more information about these notorious Judica Brothers, along with a million mostly-amateurish-and-absurd conspiracy-theory videos claiming the moon landing of 1969 was a complete hoax. The best of these is a clever satire (taken seriously by many, which was the whole point: to show how naive and idiotic these theories are) called Dark Side of the Moon. Watch it if you are at all interested in this subject, as it will show you how "convincing" these arguments can be (until they collapse in a heap of incoherence, or perhaps sardonic laughter).

So how valid is this claim that two young Italian guys, obviously smart and innovative, were able to pull down signals and even voices from remote space using cobbled-together, Heathkit-like amateur equipment? The documentary I watched, Space Hackers, makes a convincing case. There is no doubt that these guys were brilliant, and since two heads are better than one, they joined forces in an odd sort of fused-together, codependent manner. Suffice it to say they didn't get out much, and would have fit in nicely on The Big Bang Theory.

All this started with the commonly-heard beeps of Sputnik, the first Soviet satellite launched in 1957 (which I remember, though I was only 3 years old at the time: my brother Walt, a science junkie, dragged us all up on the roof of my father's store with a powerful telescope to try to see Sputnkik, which we didn't. Then we all went out and had a Spudnut, so that I forever confused the satellite with a doughnut hurtling through space.)

OK. . . confusing stuff, but some of it is compelling. Sputnik was just a start: the Judica brothers then supposedly picked up the heartbeat of Laika, the doomed dog the Russians shot into space. Then morse code SOS signals that read like howls of agony in the inferno. Mumblings from cosmonauts, full of suppressed panic, most of them in hopeless peril. The gasps, rapid heartbeat and what sounded like the death-rattle of another cosmonaut. And on it goes.

It's all Caught On Tape, folks, and last night, recovering from the worst migraine I've had in years, I was in an Oliver Sacks-ish state that can only be described as altered consciousness, my neural wiring sticking out all over my head and audibly sizzling.  (As a means of enlightenment, I don't recommend this, because it hurts like hell and makes you throw up). So I watched all kinds of things, including something that totally debunked the Judica brothers' recordings - or most of them - as fakes.

It's true that the female cosmonaut in the video I posted doesn't sound like she's speaking in the terse, formal military language of space - but was it in place back in 1961? And was it common to send women into space back then? Well, they sent a dog. The Americans sent a chimpanzee. Maybe she was the next logical step before they risked sending a man. (The photos, by the way, depict the official "first woman in space", Valentina Tereshkova, launched a few years later after they had got the major bugs out of the system: i.e. re-entry without hurtling back to earth in a blob of molten metal.)

The Judicas had an enigmatic, playful quality about them (but then, doesn't Howard Wolowitz with his dickies and his brisket and his Billie-Burke-ish girl friend also strike you as a bit dippy?). Nevertheless, as the brothers' notoriety grew in the Italian press, NASA invited them for a "friendly" visit to headquarters so that they could pose a few "friendly" questions.

Their answers are nowhere on the record, nor do we know of any attempts to harness their amateur brilliance in the service of spying on the Soviets.  It could be they were dismissed as chippers with a vivid imagination and a love of publicity. Maybe they were just attempting to score some chicks.

But if these guys really did even a fraction of what they claimed, it's astonishing.  At one point they were supposedly able to compress a long series of secret signals broadcast from Russia - a code no one could crack - and found that it was, in fact, a few phrases of music taken from the opera Boris Gudenov. (No relation to Boris Badenov of Rocky and His Friends. Come to think of it, that IS a weird coincidence.) Another time they were able (supposedly) to crack a band of frequency by calculating the exact length of an antenna they saw in a photograph.

Or. . . are they having us on, after all?

There are those who believe we went to the moon. There are those who believe we went there, but didn't land and come back because it was technically impossible. There are those who believe we had to fill that visual gap somehow (with footage shot by Stanley Kubrick?). There are those who debunk, and those who debunk the debunkers. It becomes very convoluted, to the point that an obvious satire like Dark Side of the Moon (a sendup of the "I want to believe" earnestness of those conspiracy nuts) is taken at face value.

In some cases, it just makes people angry. "Those people (the filmmakers) were lying to us! Henry Kissinger did NOT say those things!"  This speaks volumes about the IQ level of the average citizen. Like Brontosaurus, maybe their brains are in their butts.

So what do I think? Oh, I don't know. I watched the "moon shot" from a cottage on Lake of Bays, at Bondi Resort, a heavenly sort of place that nevertheless didn't have TVs, so we had to borrow one from somewhere. We had a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate the event, and suffice it to say I didn't pay much attention to the cheese.

My parents had allowed me to have wine with dinner since age 13, and after a gruelling Oxfam walk my Dad brought a glass up to my room containing a couple of ounces of Scotch mixed with orange juice.  But this time I was drunk, really drunk, though I was only 15 years old. My parents kept filling up my wine glass over and over again, and when they cut me off, my much-older siblings kept right on pouring until I was stupefied. They must have thought that seeing me drunk was kind of cute, like watching a monkey that had got hold of a bottle of beer.  After all that one-small-step-for-man business by Neil Armstrong (which should have been "a man," not that anyone cared), I remember lying on a hillside staring up at white-hot stars, disturbingly close, that wheeled and whirled like something out of Van Gogh.

Back then we all took this moon shot stuff at face value, of course. But one reason all these theories (most of them loony) are popping up now is that we're starting to realize how incredibly primitive the equipment was that launched these guys, got them to the moon and (even more incredibly) brought them back. The average SmartPhone has a thousand times more computer juice, a quantum leap (if you'll pardon the expression) beyond that dinosaur technology with its hair-raising risks.

Really, shouldn't all of them have blown up? Weird, isn't it. Just a coincidence? Sheer luck? Why did two Challenger missions end in flaming disaster, when the only Gemini/Apollo fatalities took place on the ground? (And just what did Gus Grissom have to hide? Jesus, I've got to get off this subject.)

Think of it now. What if those men had landed, made their historic moon walk and dramatic pronouncements, then couldn't get back? (My husband the science wiz, who seems to have inside information about some of this stuff, tells me that each astronaut was given a cyanide capsule before they launched.) I think even Walter Cronkite would have been at a loss for words.

The deeper you delve into all this shit, the crazier you feel. I am certain that NASA, not to mention the Soviets, did some spin on this stuff, maybe hid some things, minimized them or downplayed them. It's more likely the Soviets did coverups, just because of the nature of the Iron Curtain culture (which, by the way, I thought was a literal iron curtain, kind of like the Great Wall of China. Well, I was five.) There are those people who seem to think everything to do with government and/or the military is a conspiracy: it fills the endless hours while they wait for a girl friend (someone ditzy enough to tolerate all this shit). Oh, bring back the X Files, please.

Meanwhile we have this haunting, almost pleading voice, repetitious, so blurry it could mean almost anything. We hear what we want to hear. My own brother had Heathkits and telescopes and bunsen burners (which we used to melt lead, I am not kidding, I did it at age eight). It was trendy then to be an amateur scientist, a space geek. I married one, after all.

The documentary I saw was very strange because the brothers, now old men, still have all their dusty, creaking old equipment with the dials and chugging reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The men seem like relics who haven't kept up, their one encapsulated moment of fame now stowed in a museum of obsolescence.

And yet, and yet. At one point there was some film footage of their "antenna", or at least one of them. I expected a rod with a little bulb on it. You know, an antenna. But this was a massive structure that spread out to cover the roof of their subversive little lab. It looked like a space station up there. How had they figured that out? You couldn't get that shit from a hardware store, now could you?

To hear these old men speak, which they did in Italian with subtitles, was sheer poetry. They described how the American press dismissively thought of them as "just pizza and mandolins". Einstein (whose theory of relativity was obviously a load of conspiracy-driven bullshit) would have appreciated this. Enigmatic, rumpled, otherworldly as E.T., he had that same dreamy, subversive quality, the uncanny power of men who have stared into space, reached out in childish curiosity and pulled down the stars.

(Note. This is a summer repeat of one of my, well, don't I have the right to think so?, best pieces. It isn't really summer, but this sure is a repeat. But it's my birthday, and I can do anything I want. And if *I* didn't remember it, YOU sure as shit won't.)

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

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

Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (1995)

This incredibly strange artifact from the mid-'90s is due to resurface in a big way, and in fact I'm surprised it hasn't up to now. (Am I the first to notice?) It's an awful soaper, poorly-acted and melodramatic, and clearly takes sides against Woody (so maybe he's trying to somehow keep it out of public view? Fat chance!). But as a curiosity, it's very. . . curious. Obviously a poorly-made TV movie wouldn't hurt Woody Allen one bit, nor will any of the crap that's going on right now, as abusive patriarchs virtually always walk free, their reputations only enhanced by "restoring their good name".

Facebook is crawling with this awful stuff now (round 2 of what Allen has always called the 'What Scandal?'), and it's horribly fascinating. Did Woody "do it"? Well, what does "do" mean? It is painfully obvious that he did things to Dylan that were intrusive and damaging to a little girl's boundaries/self-esteem. To muddy the waters, Mia Farrow KNEW he was doing those things, and aside from making him go to therapy to "deal with his feelings about Dylan," she did nothing to stop him. She saw him making Dylan suck his thumb (one of the creepiest things I've ever heard of), saw him lie with his head in her lap, facing her, so that his face would be buried in her crotch. And his hairs were found in that infamous attic, to which Allen replied (after lying that he'd never been in there), "I might have stuck my head in there."

I think the public has always seen Mia Farrow as something of a saint, taking impoverished, damaged Third World children into her home to give them a second chance. All very admirable, but that doesn't change the fact that she stayed with a creepy, abusive man for twelve years in the face of dozens of red flags. And it doesn't change the fact that she may have stayed with him  to keep her newly-revived career going. Allen had crowned her the new Diane Keaton, a heady position indeed, but it's just one of the strange things he likes to do with chicks. They're his little dolls, and he can manipulate them any way he wants, professionally, sexually, any-old-way. It makes my blood run cold.

But sometimes these things don't stay buried, and the fallout is generally awful for everyone (see Michelle Phillips and her sad attempt to "heal" her family, blowing the whole thing to pieces). Is there a way to win? Not by soapboxing on either side. Maybe by crawling up out of the muck and leading a satisfying life?

Be happy. Drives your enemies crazy.

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

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