Zombie poison: death in the back yard

I'm not sure why this is -  I surely don't go looking for them - but strange stories like this one just seem to drop into my lap. Now, back in 1812 when I was a kid, we did things like smoke banana peels (after the Donovan song Mellow Yellow came out: "Elec-tric-al ba-na-na. . ."), nutmeg which turned out to paralyze the central nervous system, and tea leaves which just made us all sick. We were either too cheap to buy marijuana, or (in my case) had no idea where we were supposed to get it. I simply didn't know any drug dealers, so relied on my brother to bring hashish into the house when he came home from university. I didn't smoke up that many times, but it was far from a mellowing experience for me. I even hallucinated once, white fountains that I am SURE were not produced by cannabis. The strangest effect was the elongation of music, so that one phrase seemed to last about 5 minutes. In fact, I seemed to be able to make it last as long as I liked. Well. Mary Jane is pushing her way into the mainstream now, and becoming more and more acceptable for "medicinal" reasons, including anxiety and depression. You can even get it out of vending machines now, so WHY do people still do stupid things like eating noxious garden weeds to get high? Read on. . . 


Cornwall Seaway News

DEVIL'S SEED: Teens hospitalized after ingesting poisonous plant

Published on September 30, 2014

By Adam Brazeau

CORNWALL, Ontario - Public health officials and police in eastern Ontario are warning the public about a deadly plant that has sent several teens to the emergency room in the past few weeks.




© Kyle Walton

Jimsonweed.

And unlike other deadly toxins people take to get high this one grows wildly and locally.

The Eastern Ontario Health Unit (EOHU) issued a community safety alert on Sept. 29 after a Russell County teen was hospitalized for ingesting Datura stramonium, also known as 'Jimsonweed or Devil's Seed,' earlier in the month at a school.

OPP say the teen was spotted at a campus after school hours by faculty acting strangely and not feeling well. As police investigated the case, he was taken to the hospital.

On Sept. 26, provincial police confirmed the accused was intoxicated by the notorious plant. He has been charged with administering a noxious thing with intent - endanger life or cause bodily harm. The teen is scheduled to appear in L’Orignal Youth Court on October 29.

“Young people are not aware of the serious risk they’re taking," said Dr. Paul Roumeliotis, medical officer of health of the EOHU.

"Some of them may think of jimsonweed as a substitute for other drugs. Unfortunately, this could cost them their lives."

According to the EOHU, all parts of the plant are poisonous and contain a powerful hypnotic sedative as well as a high level of nitrate.

Symptoms usually occur within 30 to 60 minutes after ingestion and may continue for 24 to 48 hours or even longer.

Jimsonweed is described as odorous with pointed green leaves sprouts trumpet-shaped white or purple flowers, as well as a prickly pod filled with dozens of seeds.

Common effects include high fever, racing heart rate, blurry vision, hallucinations and delusions. More severely, the plant can also cause seizures and comas.

Roumeliotis urges parents and caregivers to speak with their children regarding the dangers posed by jimsonweed in order to prevent any further victims.

In 2007, over a dozen teens in the Cornwall area were hospitalizes after ingesting the hallucinogenic plant.

Search for Jimsonweed on www.omafra.gov.on.ca to learn more.

For additional information, contact the Addiction Services of the Cornwall Community Hospital at 613-936-9236 or toll free at 1 800 272-1937.

But hey, folks. There's more to this story, as there usually is. It struck me as idiotic beyond lunacy for kids to be ingesting this obviously-toxic substance. They deserve what they get, don't they? But when I saw the name datura, it rang some sort of ancient bell from 20 years ago, when I took an an anthropology class exploring the roots of indigenous medicine. Wade Davis! The Serpent and the Rainbow! The true cult of the zombie, in which people from Haiti and other spooky juju-infested lands were poisoned to induce a deathlike state, buried, and revived so as to appear to come to life again. All to prove the spectacular powers of the shaman. Along with the anaesthetizing venom of the puffer fish, datura was a crucial ingredient in zombification. Is that why kids are ripping noxious weeds out of their back yards and eating them, or smoking them, or whatever-it-is-they-do?

Home / ZOMBIE SCIENCE / WORLD BELIEFS / “SCARIEST” DRUG CREATES ZOMBIES

“SCARIEST” DRUG CREATES ZOMBIES

Posted by: ZRS Staff in WORLD BELIEFS May 20, 2013 1 Comment

Unlike corpses rising from the grave in George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead, Voodoo zombies are created through a mixture of drugging, religious ritual, and cultural belief.

After being put into a trance-like state that approximates a coma, victims are regularly fed the hallucinogenic drug scopolamine, derived from the Datura stramonium plant, otherwise known as jimsonweed, the zombie cucumber or the Devil’s weed.

Vice Magazine called scopolamine/Datura the scariest drug on the planet because of its ability to completely consume the mind of those who ingest it (see video below).

Webster University Professor Emeritus and Haitian scholar, Bob Corbett, had this to add:

“Eating the zombie cucumber keeps them in their zonked-out state, but otherwise they are just like animals in a pen and will do what they are told to do.  Mainly they’re used as slave labor.”

Corbett went on to emphasize that despite the effect of the drug Voodoo zombies have beating hearts, and normal blood flow and body temperature. They need to sleep and eat regular foods, and are not contagious, dangerous or aggressive in the slightest.

Here we have an example of taking something that has a kernel of truth in it - people being poisoned to render them docile or even make them appear dead - and stretching it in all sorts of bizarre directions. No doubt this has been a boon for the film industry, but it just has nothing to do with reality. Datura doesn't give you an appetite for human flesh - not as far as I know. It doesn't turn you all grainy and black-and-white and make you kill people with shovels. But the phenomenon of one-upping reality, of creating Boogiemen, is a very ancient one. I won't get into Slenderman (yet - I'll probably write about it sooner or later) and all the ludicrous superstitions that can completely disable the rational brain. But the progress of science and technology has done nothing to eradicate or even slow the viral spread of these terror-based beliefs. In fact, what with the internet, social media and other woeful ills of the 21st century, sick superstitious beliefs can rip through the culture like wildfire, damaging our young people most of all.

So PLEASE do not go out into the back yard with scissors, unless you are planning on trimming the hedges over a very long period of time.

"Mellow Yellow"

I'm just mad about saffron

A-saffron's mad about me

I'm-a just mad about saffron

She's just mad about me

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

I'm just mad about fourteen

Fourteen's mad about me

I'm-a just mad about a-fourteen

A-she's just mad about me

They call me mellow yellow

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

Born-a high forever to fly

A-wind-a velocity nil

Born-a high forever to fly

If you want, your cup I will fill

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

So mellow yellow

Electrical banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Electrical banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

Yes, saffron, yeah

I'm just-a mad about her

I'm-a just-a mad about-a saffron

She's just mad about me

They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

Oh, so yellow

Oh, so mellow

Donovan

 

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:

Barnes & Noble

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

Thistledown Press

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

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

Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?

Welsh-singing voices: As the Deer Pants for the Water

Lone outrider: Glen Allen's private battle

Glen Allen remembered in his own words

Blogger's note. I happened upon this, as so often is the case, while looking for something else. It was a piece I had seen before, reproduced on someone else's blog. I knew Glen Allen. We never met face-to-face, but we wrote to each other regularly for ten years while he went through storms that I can only imagine. How he functioned as well as he did, for as long as he did, is remarkable, and I strongly suspect the same could be said of Robin Williams.

After being out of touch for years, I learned Glen's fate in 2005, when I was at the apogee of my own storm: I opened my daily paper and saw his picture under the obituaries. Having just taken a massive overdose, he had wandered out of a psychiatric ward in Toronto and passed out beside the railroad tracks in sub-zero December. How people die says something about the way they lived, and it struck me as oddly apropos that he died like some of the street people he understood and loved so well. 

What I didn't know, because he never told me, is that he wasn't just a newspaper reporter but an award-winning print journalist, war correspondent, English teacher in China, volunteer in mental health services, radio producer for CBC's Morningside, and no doubt many other things he didn't think significant enough to mention. 

This piece is very long, but I run it here without edits. Without a doubt, it is the best piece on depression, bipolar disorder and mental illness in general that I have ever read, and it is typical of Glen that he generously shared it even while struggling with his own recovery. Even in the throes of a consuming illness, Glen Allen had a certain unmistakeable quality of grace.

(The following story appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19.
1999, under the headline Angels of Madness. Glen Allen was found frozen
to death last week in Toronto.)

By Glen Allen

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in
a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic
and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. I am
climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were

reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to

see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?

 

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:

Barnes & Noble

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

Thistledown Press

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

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

Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?

A cry for help

As with so many things, I have tried to figure out the point of this. It's from a very bad movie starring Mitzi Gaynor, whose name I could never stand, called The I Don't Care Girl. In this number, which strains to be avant garde and flamboyant and all that uninhibited shit, she flings herself around in a slutty outfit and repeatedly shrieks, "I DON'T CARE".  How they got one of America's foremost concert pianists to put on a dog suit, or a wolf suit or whatever it is (first I thought it was a cat suit, but I don't think so) is beyond me, but he may have been stoned on pills. Alarmingly, I seem to be travelling backward in time to 2012 and my Oscar Levant phase, which was quite fascinating, at least for me.

Oscar Levant in drag. He still has that saturnine Slavic face, melancholy crumpled brow and incredible profile even when wearing this ridiculous old-lady suit. There was something truly poetic about him, original, and sad.

I almost want to apologize for this post, and for the last one about my dream, which came pretty much straight out of my journal. Though my life isn't bad now, my attitude toward my work couldn't be worse. Frustration and failed dreams are beginning to curdle into cynicism and bitterness. So what do I do?

Turn again?

That dream about talking to Harold - well, analyzing a dream can puncture it, leave it limp and lifeless. But I found it strange, or I do now,  that though I was fairly interested, I was not wildly excited nor even surprised that I could meet a man who had been dead for 40 years. He didn't really look like HL, though I knew it was him, in that weird way that people can shape-shift in dreams. He looked almost like a cartoon of himself or one of those standard 1950s black-and-white businessmen on TV sitcoms, the Dad on Dennis the Menace or something. Pulling out that list of ten questions was killing. If this was supposed to be some sort of interview, the dynamics had been completely reversed. He had taken control utterly, and obviously didn't really want to know anything about me or have any sort of real exchange. Just answer the questions, like a quiz. I grabbed the paper and crumpled it up and threw it away, and at first he looked disconcerted, but then -

BLANK.

The most crucial part of a dream liquefies and collapses like the centre of a caramel chocolate left out in the sun too long, or microwaved to see if it'll make it taste better. (I do that all the time, even though it's fairly idiotic and usually ruins the item in question.) We talked, yes, in a little more relaxed way, and I felt a bit hopeful, but I don't remember ANY of the content, though obviously that should have been the whole point of the dream. He got up to leave quickly - God, he WAS in black and white, though I wasn't. - and when I shouted after him, "Can I send you a copy of my novel?" he said, "Oh, no" in a sort of bright, breezy, utterly dismissive way.

What does it all mean? Well, what do YOU think it means? This chimera, this rare unicorn in the woods has retreated back into the mist. Now I feel a bit ridiculous to have taken this on. I should've written about Oscar Levant, instead. Or anything else. I allowed my imagination to go wild, as you are supposed to. Writer's imaginations are damnation, like a muscle that has been worked and worked, a huge grotesque bicep good for nothing except completely disabling your arm.

Dream-Harold's dismissal represents pretty much the reception of my novel, and at the same time, my lovely torturous Facebook experience grinds it into me daily how much more successful all other writers are, how they are wined and dined and laugh buoyantly out on the terrace while sipping rare champagne and smoking cigarettes in long holders. With those long white gloves on, you know, Deborah Kerr-type gloves that are sort of wrinkled, and immaculate as if you never touch anything because you don't have to. I however am left with my nose pressed against the windowpane. It was that way with my two other novels, and as a matter of fact, it has been that way throughout my entire life with the majority of things. The feeling is, I should go away now and not embarrass myself any further. For my failure embarrasses THEM, you see, and intimidates them, for hungry dogs lurk around the outside of the terrace with the men wearing their top hats and the women in the wrinkled gloves. Hungry dogs who never "made it", though everyone else did, of course, because God loves them and doesn't love you.

And that's what the dream means.

Postscript. I forgot about the Jerusalem part, watching the choir at the beginning of the dream. This may have just been some sort of crazy-ass thing that wasn't even connected, and it was full of the Dali-esque symbolism (speaking of melting) that suggests dada or theatre of the absurd.The hymn was significant to me in the past, quite significant in fact: it was on an old Christmas album of mine, and I used to thrill to it, cry, etc. It was Special in that I only listened to it at that time of year. Then I remembered more about it: it was on an old LP that I transferred to a tape, but the sound quality got worse and worse over the years. I made the mistake of sending the LP away somewhere to get it transferred to a CD, as was common then when nobody had any equipment to do it. When it did come back months later, it was a worse mess than the original. The album "faded in" at the start - in other words, it didn't just start normally, so it sounded like  ". . . oy to the WORLD. . ." When I complained about it, they said they did that with all their transfers "for effect". Imagine losing the first couple of bars of every song - this is effect?

So what does this have to do with anything? I suppose it's just part of my odd history with the song.

Which is all about the present world passing away and a New World, a new Jerusalem taking its place. The afterlife, as I understand it. It means crossing over. Leaving this world forever for greener and saintlier pastures, where the music is better and somebody listens to you.

Literal death, or just the death of my dream? The death of my dream is bloody painful. The theme of my life is family, with all its monumental struggles and irreplaceable rewards. That's it, that's  my assignment while here on earth, and I guess I'm not going to get beyond it no matter what my efforts. I often say, well, when you're lying on your deathbed (speaking of crossing over), is your career going to walk in and say, "I love you and I will never leave you until the end"? I don't see it.

And once again the scene was chang'd
New earth there seem'd to be,
I saw the Holy City
Beside the tideless sea
The light of God was on its streets
The gates were open wide,
And all who would might enter
And no one was denied.
No need of moon or stars by night,
Or sun to shine by day,
It was the new Jerusalem
That would not pass away

It was the new Jerusalem

That would not pass away
Jerusalem! Jerusalem!
Sing for the night is o'er
Hosanna in the highest,
Hosanna for evermore

Hosanna in the highest,

Hosanna for evermore!

(I don't set out to do it this way. But I don't like to do a whole lot of separate posts on the same subject, or, worse, incorporate new information into the original post. This whole blogging thing is a process, with deeper layers uncovered and connections made - perhaps the most valuable part of it. So sometimes I end up with a P. S. to the P. S. With all those hosannas at the end of The Holy City, I remembered something I had heard in a Bible class somewhere. The leader looked around the circle searchingly and asked, "OK, who knows what hosanna means?" Of course all the hands shot up and someone claimed it meant "Praise God!" or some-such. Then, shaking his head with the intense pleasure of proving everyone wrong and himself right, he said, "Oh, no, it doesn't."

And it doesn't.

Nothing comforting about the original meaning: it is a cry of anguish, fear and near-despair. Somewhere along the line, someone found that definition too "strong" and softened it. On Palm Sunday, the crowds were really shouting to Jesus, "Save us! Save us!" Kind of puts a whole new spin on it, doesn't it?)

Strong's Concordance

hósanna: save, we pray

Original Word: ὡσαννά

Part of Speech: Hebrew Form (Indeclinable)

Transliteration: hósanna

Phonetic Spelling: (ho-san-nah')

Short Definition: hosanna

Definition: (Aramaic and Hebrew, originally a cry for help), hosanna!, a cry of happiness.

HELPS Word-studies

5614 hōsanná – a transliteration of the Hebrew term (hôsî-âh-nā) meaning "Oh, save now!" or "Please save!"

[The -na suffix in Hebrew expresses intense emotion. 5614 (hōsanná) comes from two Hebrew roots meaning, "Save now!" (= "Save I pray!").]

Jerusalem dreams

I had a very strange dream about Harold Lloyd.  I was listening to some gospel music, or rather watching it performed live, and it was the anthem Jerusalem
 (a. k. a. The Holy City) being done in a very over-the-top way. Later I was trying to find a recording of it because it reminded me of church, as if it was being sung by my former church choir, though nobody looked the same. At one point I was sticking a pencil in a vast machine-looking box to unlock it. In some way the music was supposed to come out of it, but the pencil kept breaking off, so I didn't get to hear it again.

Then I had a chance to meet Harold Lloyd. He looked like a slim, good-looking but otherwise unremarkable middle-aged businessman, from the era of his talkies in the mid-1930s (I was thinking The Milky Way where he plays a milkman boxer), and he started firing questions at me: ten standard questions handwritten on a piece of paper “just to get to know each other”. This was his usual method with people. I took the piece of paper and crumpled it up and threw it away and said, “Let’s just talk to each other instead.” He looked uncomfortable, but seemed to come out of it and we talked. I don’t remember anything we said after that, but he soon left, and as he went out the door I yelled after him, “Would you like me to send you my novel?” He breezily said, “Oh, n-” (the “o” disappearing as he vanished around the corner and was gone). 

No interest at all. Oh no, don’t send it to me. No one even wants to READ it to find out what they think. "I already know I don't like it." Like a little kid with new food.

Oscar Levant: one-man band

Oscar, reclining and reflective, begins to dream. He dreams he is in a vast concert hall. . . 

. . . playing Gershwin's Concerto in F with his cigarette-stained fingers. . . 

. . . and conducting at the same time. . . (and he was a real conductor so he isn't just waving his arms)

. . . and likewise the  percussion, he's really playing (an early

 example of cloning, or else he accelerates himself to the speed of sound)

My personal fave, cuz he looks so sexy. . . 

     Cute with a gong (and doesn't he look a bit like Buster Keaton?)

"Bravo! Bravo!"

(I stumbled on these while looking for gifs on Google. I keep looking for gifs on Google and finding MY gifs and thinking, why are MY gifs so much better than anyone else's? 'Strue, you know. These were made during my feverish Oscar Levant phase a couple of years ago. It was fascinating, and I am sure I could dig out more now if I wanted to. In fact, what brought me here in the first place was finding another Levant performance on YouTube. He shows up in odd places on Turner Classics and always adds something strangely appealing to otherwise-routine movies. He showed up in an abomination called The I Don't Care Girl, in which he played something so convoluted and strange that I couldn't guess who wrote it. Just ripped through it like chain lightning. He also wore a strange tiger-striped cat suit for one scene in which he had one line. There was nobody like him, and perhaps that was a good thing.)

 

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:

Barnes & Noble

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

Thistledown Press

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

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

Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?

Bear on the Rampage: outtakes

The gigantic black bear that terrorized the small town of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, holding its citizens hostage for a tense two hours.

The bear's preferred method of attack was to lie down on his victims.

The bear could sprint at a fantastic rate, reaching speeds of  up to 1/4  mile per hour.

BEAR!!!!!

Exhausted from a long day of terrorizing Port Coquitlam, the enormous bear lies down for a refreshing 15-hour nap.

Weekly World News: Bear on the Rampage!

Hello, and welcome to the silly hour. Or, at least, the silly story of the week. I didn't get to see this bear, and yet, in some remote spiritual way, I felt I was involved. I had just had my hair done, and my stylist told me, "my daughter just texted me that there's a 900-pound bear on the loose and the school is in lockdown." Alarmed, she cautioned me against walking home (which would take me right past Ground Zero, the bear's immediate vicinity), so of course I had to go and see this for myself. And yes - at Prairie and Oxford, the place was abuzz with TV cameras (CTV, CBC, Global and a couple of others), reporters, cops, conservation officers and numerous curious spectators.

It seemed I had come a little late and missed the bear. But it was all over the news that night, the top story. (Only in Vancouver!) On the CTV News report, a bystander makes a comment about the bear eating rotten apples and getting drunk, a completely bogus story designed to make it look as if he knew something. (Every crowd has its self-appointed expert/pompous asshole.) The media immediately seized this and ran with it. Now Buster Bear (or Busterina, as some people claim - but how can they tell?) is all over the internet, mainly because of that "hungover bear" angle and the "rampaging" description, which is just about as stupid as anything I've read for the past 2 or 3 hours.

From the footage, even when the conservation guys screamed and fired rubber bullets and "bear bangers" (don't ask) at it at close range, the bear only managed a lethargic trot. For the most part it just snoozed. I looked at a close shot of its face, and it's definitely a battlescarred old bear, with part of one ear missing and a face scratched up from many a battle in the bramble bushes.

The thing is, people have strange ideas about bears, thinking  they run after forest animals and eat them, when not busy killing small children. Bears are foragers and eat fruit and roots and bugs and other stuff that comes out of the ground, with honey being their favorite. I rarely see bears on my walking trails, but I DO see great chunks of rubbed-off fur on tree trunks, and bear scat which is a tarry black and usually full of fruit pits. Salmon they like, when they can get it, but for the most part they're vegetarian. One cannot fault them for being attracted to garbage, but I think that is entirely our fault for being such filthy animals ourselves. No other species is as destructive as the human being.

Anyway, I wish I HAD seen Buster the other day, but I'll have to be content with these (what, you didn't think there'd be - ?) - these humble gifs.

Bear Gallery

Say cheese(cake)!

http://mashable.com/2014/09/26/hungover-bear/

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/old-ass-fat-ass-bear-roams-around-canadian-neighborhoo-1639496408

Is it Friday yet?