Real live girl. (Whistle) Real live girl. (Whistle)

 

(From a musical called Little Me, unknown.)

FRED

Pardon me, miss, but I've never done this
With a real live girl.

Straight off the farm with an actual arm

Full of real live girl.

Pardon me if your affectionate squeeze

Fogs up my glasses and buckles my knees,

I'm simply drowned in the sight and the sound

And the scent and the feel

Of a real live girl.

SOLDIERS

Nothing can beat getting swept off your feet

By a real live girl.

Dreams in your bunk don't compare with a hunk

Of a real live girl.

Speaking of miracles, this must be it;

Just when I started to learn how to knit.

I'm all in stitches from finding what riches

A waltz can reveal

With a real live girl.

[Whistle]

Real live girl.

[Whistle]

Real live girl.

I've seen photographs and facsimiles

That have set my head off in a whirl,

But no work of art gets you right in the heart

Like a real live girl.

Take your statues of Juno,

And the Venus de My-lo.

(Me-lo.)

When a fellow wants you-know,

(We know.)

Who wants substitutes? I'll o-

Verlook everyone in the book

For a real

Sexy Sally or Suzabel.

Take your Venetian or Roman or Grecian

Ideal,

I'll take something more "uzabel."

Girls were like fellas was once my belief;

What a reversal, and what a relief.

I'll take the flowering hat and the towering heel

And the squeal

Of a real live girl.

[Dance]

Real live girl.

[Dance]

Real live girl.

Go be a holdout for Helen of Troy,

I am a healthy American boy.

I'd rather gape at the dear little shape

Of the stern and the keel

Of a full-time vocational,

Full-operational

Girl.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

Who let the goats out?

Sky Ladder: Wowsy-wow-WOW!

Oh deer: it's PORNOGRAPHY!

 

Yes, we're going bananas

Meow meow meow meow

 

Just a little diversion

Just a sweet little something to wash out your mouth after my bitter diatribe. Fuck 'em, I'm going to go walk in the woods.

The care and feeding of an Amazon author

Long ago, and oh so far away, I was a book reviewer. Books came out every season, and my editor

for whatever publication I was writing for (Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, etc.) would phone me and run some titles by me, or even send a few and let me pick. I did this for a shocking, disgraceful and deeply embarrassing 25 or 30 years, which I've been told I must take off my resume so it won't look "dated". But I loved the work and I suppose would have kept on with it.

I wonder what happened to it all.

Now it's slam, click, like, buy, gulp, consume, poop it out the other side, with normalized ADD as a laxative. More than ever, it's "product" like Dairy Queen soft-serve, only brown.

I got out of it, I had to, the last book nearly killed me because I didn't understand the language of barter: you give me five stars for MY book, I'll give you five stars for YOUR book, and neither one of us will have read the book because we're too busy turning out more slop and swill.

(The worst example of this was a published author who "friended" me, then immediately messaged me and said she had looked at my Amazon author page and noticed I "didn't have too many reviews". She said my work looked "great" and would love to rate it with five stars if I'd take a look at HER page, which "didn't have too many reviews" either, so maybe we could help each other. She said she'd try to take a closer look at my stuff - meaning, read it - if she had time. Her page had a sci-fi dragon/maiden-with-flaxen-hair/his-manhood-stood-erect series (oh, these endless SERIES - big sellers, I'm told) with approximately 200 reviews. OK then. The "unfriend" button is a Godsend sometimes.)

You can't say I didn't try, in fact I tried everything I could think of, but somehow the "everything" was always desperate, embarrassing and "wrong".  I just don't know the secret handshake, and as far as my self-esteem is concerned, I'm still being shunned on the playground because I just don't know how to do this. And PLEASE, don't anybody send me instructions, because that is not what I am talking about. 

Did I stop writing? I write for myself now, every single day, and it is intensely enjoyable, but I don't mean to show it to anyone. Ever. This is the only way I can maintain the purity of the experience and keep my sanity intact.

(A P. S. to the sci-fi dragon-lady story: she mentioned the name of a Hollywood producer who might be interested in looking at The Glass Character, deliberate catnip. I did a little research on this guy, and while he pretends to be a producer, he is a convicted felon who has never "produced" anything but a criminal record. If you're a serious writer, if there are any of you left out there, watch your back.)

Upside-down and backwards

I love old film leaders, and they make swell gifs, so I've giffed quite a few of them. This is from an old Terrytoons cartoon from 1930, the kind they used to show on Saturday morning. What I love about this one is that, for some unknown reason, the countdown is UPSIDE-DOWN. I like the splashy effect from all the grease pencil notations, or whatever they are, and the general deterioration of the film stock, which I also love.

Made this one quite a while ago, when Gifsforum was still working and you had some flexibility in speed, etc. It's quite a long one, too. I've posted the slowest of the three versions I made, so you can see all those lovely fuzzy, blurry, scribbly details, along with the countdown that stops at two. I notice here that the writing is backwards, too. A film technician would know why.

This is a little bonus, one of my favorite old movie logos with a CHICKEN instead of a lion roaring. Well, a rooster. Still, it's pretty bizarre.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

It's very clear

Rummaging through my files of scans - and of course I didn't find the item I wanted - I came across this, obviously scanned from a book. But most of my book scans turn out shitty, grainy or covered in criss-cross lines. That's partly due to the fact that my scanner costs  $14.99, but this - this actually came out nicely, with a lot of detail, a sense of infinity which lends it that lovely sense of certain doom.  I had to tweak it a bit to bring out the contrast, as Harold sort of greyed out and blended in to the building. These types of shots are posed promotional photos, nothing like screenshots, and there must have been tons of them, which necessitated hanging on to the wall and remaining absolutely still with the right facial expression. Some have noted that there is a naturalness to HL's stills which makes people think they were taken directly from the films. You find these little nooks and crannies of craftsmanship when you study Harold. He took the trouble, and whether his fans consciously knew it or not, it's one of the reasons they kept coming back for more.

One of the better gifs found on Facebook

 

and death shall have no dominion.

Happy. . . birth. . .day. . .Mr. . . Pres-i-dent. . .

 

At least they don't melt

Every summer, we have a tradish - or I do - of knitting something for the girls while they're away on their camping trip, usually animals of some kind. Not sure when this started, but apparently it led to squeals of delight: "Look what Nanny made!'.

This is the first time I have knitted food for them (though I did an assortment of vegetables in a basket for their Mum): ice cream cones, and they're harder than they look. There are two components (I won't tell you what they are, eejit), the bottom half usually being harder. Displaying them without them falling over is a challenge. I used those plastic molds that you use to make juice popsicles. They had to be good for something.

The element of surprise in these projects is crucial, though I never get to see it. This all started small and escalated, a little alarmingly. A couple of years ago I made a tableau called Snail Valley (still reverberating in memory) that I am particularly proud of:

This is only a tiny percentage of it, as I photographed the snails before I knitted the leaves, branches, mushrooms, rocks, trees, etc. that completed the scene. I don't know how many snails I completed, probably at least ten, all different from each other.  I must say they're cool. The pattern had the snail's eyes in a jolly, winky position on their head. SNAILS DO NOT HAVE THEIR EYES ON THEIR HEADS. They loll out on gooey, freaky stalks, the ends of their slimy retractable antennae.

This is the Megasnail, about ten inches long, commissioned for an 8th birthday. 

The body was harder to make than the shell.

Oh well.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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