Hot town: screams in the night

It was one of them-thar hot, HOT summers in Chatham, in the heel of Southwestern Ontario, when it felt like someone was holding something to your nose and mouth so you could not breathe. Sweat accumulted in layers on your skin, but if it evaporated at all, it provided no relief from the relentless, doggy heat.

We didn't take showers then, because you just didn't - women washed their hair in the sink and wrapped a towel around their head, turban-style (God knows why, or how they ever dried it). If you were so hot you were turning into melted rubber, you lay in a bath tub full of tepid water, drained it, and felt more moist and clammy than ever. As far as I know, people didn't bathe every day, nor were clothes washed as often, but perhaps the predominance of natural fibres kept us from keeling over from each other's stench.

The humidity devil did not let up often. But on certain nights the sky suddenly cracked open, and floods of lukewarm rain caused some of us (mostly kids, or a few heat-crazed adults) to strip down to our bare essentials and go out in it, dancing around, hair streaming, mouth open. The cracks of livid electricity almost made my hair stand on end, and sometimes I felt it zip up my arms as if it wanted me for some awful unknown purpose.

But the buckets of rain did not help. Soon everything was just steaming, the air more choked with water than before.

Cicadas buzzed their long, almost sexual-sounding arches of sound on those summer afternoons in which time seemed to hang suspended. We didn't like finding the adults - "June bugs", they were usually called, big fat things with wings - but the cast-off shells of the nymphs were magical. They appeared all over the bark of the elm trees that would all-too-soon be felled due to disease, never to be seen again.

But at night, there was this - this sound! A night bird, one that I called "the Skeezix bird" because that's what it sounded like. On damp, hollow, star-filled Chatham nights, the Skeezix would begin to swoop in the sky, the sound swinging near and far so that you couldn't tell exactly where it was. I don't think I ever saw one.  It had to be some kind of hawk or falcon. But nobody ever referred to it or talked about it. It was just there, like the sexy drawn-out tambourine-hiss of the cicadas. All part of summer in the city.

But when I heard the Skeezix bird, every so often I also heard the strangest sound, halfway between a burp and a groan. Short, hollow, and - stupid really, because obviously it had nothing to do with the bird, yet there it was, persistent. I even asked other people about it once, and no one had ever heard it. It seemed like nobody really wanted to talk about it. At least they looked at me strangely, though I suppose by then I should have been used to that.

Then one time, my older brother said, "You know that booming noise? It's sound waves from the hawk bouncing off buildings."

It wasn't. In fact, until this very moment I didn't know what the hell it was or how it could be related to the Skeezix bird.

Then came this answer, this beautiful, golden Answer. Simply laid out. Not even any video, just a clear audio explanation with pictures. There WAS a Skeezix bird, even if it was called something else. If it was creating that groany boom out in nature, obviously it had nothing to do with sound waves and buildings.

The real explanation is exotic and a little far-fetched, but it must be true. It just took me fifty years to find it. Play the video above, and be enlightened.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Just like the heat, it'll be all right

Classic Phil Spector wall-of-sound genius

Gigantic cat head conquers Tokyo!

A group of students at the Japan School of Wool Art have created a startlingly realistic, gigantic wool felt cat head that can be worn as a mask. The project was led by the students’ art teacher, Housetu Sato.

The head will be on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from April 18-23, 2015. Although there are no current plans to make more or sell the giant cat head, the recent online attention the artwork is generating may change things…

[via Laughing Squid]

Introducing the EGG MASTER!

Kitchen gadgets review: the Egg Master – a horrifying, unholy affair

I can’t look at the hot sweating mess that emerges from the Egg Master’s opening, let alone eat it

The egg roll writhes like an alien parasite in search of a host body … Rhik Samadder testing the Egg Master. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

What?

The Egg Master is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured into the plastic tube are heated by an embedded, wraparound element. When ready, food spontaneously rises from the device.
Why?

Because there is no God.

The Egg Master has to be observed in all its slow-mo action to be truly appreciated.

Well?

This week’s gadget describes itself as “a new way to prepare eggs”, which is accurate in the way that chopping off your legs could be described as a new way to lose weight. Let’s start with that name, its unsettling taint of S&M, an overtone consistent with the design. In hot pink and stippled black rubber, Egg Master’s exterior screams cut-price, mail-order adult toy; its funnelled hole suggests terrible uses. And it has a traffic light on it, for some reason.

“Spray non-stick agent into container”, the box advises, which definitely gets the tummy rumbling. As instructed, I crack two whole eggs into the hot tunnel, trying to ignore the gurgling sound from within. It’s impossible to see what’s going on – but it smells bad. I squint into the dark opening. A bulging yellow sac peers back at me. Minutes pass; the smell does not. Then, without warning, a flaccid, spongy log half jumps from the machine, writhing like an alien parasite in search of a host body. It’s horrifying, like a scene from The Lair of the White Worm.

I can’t look at it, let alone eat it. To stall, I consult the badly photocopied handbook, which suggests other delicious treats this baby is good for. Egg Master Egg Crackers, which is mixed-up crackers, egg and cheese; Egg Master Egg Dog; PB&J (peanut butter and jelly) Egg Master, and the tantalising Cuban Egg Master. It’s a dossier of culinary hate crimes (barbecue Pork Egg Master has two ingredients, “biscuit dough and three teaspoons of precooked pork”). Nervously, I try the sulphuric, sweating egg mess before me. The taste is … not the best. As I dry heave into the sink, I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it? Maybe no one. Perhaps soon, sooner than you think, we will all bow to the Egg Master.

Redeeming features?

It’s quite space-efficient, being so dense with evil. The box contains free wooden skewers, to defend yourself from your food, and a pipe cleaner to swab the device, although no holy water to soak it in.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?

Under the floorboards. 5/5. Just kidding. 0/5.

Wait, there's more!

I'm sorry. . . no, really.

There's a word for that

Since a non-updated blog is worse than a neglected lawn, here is something that is doing the rounds. No one can ever accuse me of stealing anything, ever again, because everything is everywhere, especially on the completely useless Pinterest which does NOT give you links to that cute knitting pattern that you crave so much.

It just shows you what the things are. There. Look. Done.

This sounds a bit like something you'd say after a sneeze (and by the way, I HATE "bless you" because it is not only useless, it is prissy, antiquated and implies that sneezing is so Satanic that we have to say a little incantation over it, to which you are supposed to/HAVE to reply, "thank you," even if you hate the custom like worms.)

I have a lot of these. By the way, have you ever noticed how useless coasters are? All the water from condensation pools up on them, then when you pick your glass up (unsticking it from the coaster first), the accumulation dribbles wetly down your front. I have designed my own coasters made of felt glued to cork, various fabrics, and even hollowed-out sponge that fastens to the bottom of the glass. No one seems to want these.

Oh yes, we all know this one but never coined a word for it. Happens at least once a week around here, when two of the grandgirls, the blondie Scandinavian-looking ones, drop by. By the way, where did such white-blonde hair come from in our family system? Their mother is a dark brunette, and any blondeness in the rest of the family is of the dirty/darkened variety. How far back does this stuff go? 

GLORY be to God for dappled things 

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings. . . 

I think this is a nice way of saying "rude annoying none-o'-yer-bizness" types. What's it to you? Why do you want to know? You Pochemuchka.

That's always the sweetest part, isn't it? The dessert after the dessert. That time when you're just not quite ready to break up the party. That little conversation in the parking lot of the restaurant that doesn't quite want to end.

This isn't quite the same as "Jayzus!!", but conveys a similar sentiment as you listen, for perhaps the 14th time, to a good joke told very badly. Even worse than that is the fake, polite way people laugh at it, because you're supposed to laugh at a joke. Next time you're at a social function, count the laughs. At the end of the evening, do a tally: how many were genuine laughs, and how many were fake, social ha-ha-ha-ha-has?

I would do anything in Hawaiian, even scratch my head to remember something. I love the place, love the soft embrace of the air and the way you can go about in a bathing suit with jiggling legs and a jiggling fanny, and nobody cares. 

I had this in the States once, and couldn't wait to get out of there. We have so much bad press/bad vibes piped our way from news items and the popular culture that it's easy to believe they're all a bunch of pistol-packin' yahoos. It's a distortion created in part by the American press, ironically, though Canadians do their share of high-horsitude about it all, as if we're not also rotten with petty crime and gang wars.  But I think  that, in a manner of speaking, the good folk in the United States generally trump the bad.

Uh, so you buy, it, I guess.

Never thought it was roadlike, more moonlike, but it does move around a lot, doesn't it? 

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

TAXI DRIVER with Woody Allen

One of the best re-cuts I've seen. I've been obsessed with Taxi Driver for years, and can never rip myself away from it when it comes on TV. It's that musical score, I think, and DeNiro's hypnotic monotone voice. The Mohawk, the white dress, the clapping, the bloody walls. It's all here, folks - and Woody Allen, too.

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Falling in love again: damn you, Harold!

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I can't help it

Love's always been my game

Play it how I may

I was made that way

I can't help it

Men cluster to me

Like moths around a flame

And if their wings burn

I know I'm not to blame

Falling in love again

Never wanted to

What am I to do?

I just can't help it

I am a sap. And I know it. For years now - YEARS - I have pursued this elusive, illusive wild aquatic fowl, as Spock would put it. I have run around and around chasing my own tail.

There is a pattern to this. Falling like a shot sparrow, or an elk with an arrow through its heart, I lie quivering, seemingly dead. Then, mysteriously, sometimes years later, something happens.

I don't know how it happens.

I can't help but feel that my third published novel failed just as disastrously as the first two. I don't know why this is, except that I am not a very good hustler. In today's atmosphere of kill or be killed, that's as fatal as not being able to write at all.

I doubt if I will ever know how to play this game, and that admission is supposed to bring great humiliation down on me. At the same time, I am supposed to smile and act as if everything is fine. There is a slow trickle of articles from people "admitting" they have needed help for depression and other forms of mental illness. But it's quickly tucked away again as we put on our game face and get back out into the fray.

For that's how we "win", isn't it?

Harold enchanted me and totally took me over. I walk away, storm away, over and over again, after a year or couple of years, and I am sure it's "over", which I believe it actually is. So why then am I sending out yet another copy to someone in Los Angeles, making one more email attempt to reach someone in the UK? All my attempts to get someone to notice my book are so far-fetched, they are practically ludicrous, and I might as well save myself the postage. I always feel embarrassed to do any of it, but I am pulled back and forth because I also feel tremendous pressure to do it. And I should be doing it a  whole lot better than this.

Death never appealed to me much, either the death of my novels/dreams, or my own. I keep getting up again. It's stupid. Everything I do here is stupid because nobody sees it or cares anyway. But if I say so, I risk looking like a loser. So let's stay chipper.

Never wanted to. What am I to do? I can't help it.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Degraded humanity: Nazi baby farm

This is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen: a Nazi "baby farm", the preferred method of raising the next generation of Superbeings to serve the Third Reich.

So deluded were they that they seemed to believe that rough-handling infants, slinging them around by the feet and massing them together like a product was the best and most efficient way of producing a healthy population of emotionless thugs for the Third Reich. They look like they are all the same age and size, reminding me most horribly of the rigid uniformity in Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will  They resemble plucked chickens who have somehow survived processing and evisceration. Most of these would either have been kidnapped from invaded countries (if their Aryan blood was deemed to be pure) or bred from blonde-haired maidens and officers in the elite corps of the SS.

How could this happen? we ask over and over again. It's the same thing that happens in cults. People surrender their will. So much for triumph. Babies en masse, surrendered to the Cause. Brains facing forward, all without a single thought.

Laughing Buddha: the Dalai Lama giggle reel

Be it known that there are very few things, or people, in this world that give me hope. I think in 50 years this planet will be so degraded that billions will have died, and conditions will be intolerable for the rest, perhaps the worst humanity has ever known. And as humanity is wont to do, the remainder will simply tear each other apart.

BUT MEANTIME, we have this lovely man, this laughing Buddha, this Dalai Lama who has become such a profound spiritual leader for saying such simple things. Simple, but perhaps not easy. I'd make a gif of this, but. . . you've got to draw the line somewhere. Since he has been around for a long time, there are even photos of His Holiness with Thomas Merton, but we won't go there.

So, between the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis and Malala, will humanity make it? No. But at least the slide down into unimageinable hell will be, perhaps, a little less horrendous.