"The Living Sea-Gem": almost my favorite comic book ad

To you - and only you, beloved readers - I offer up this truly strange artifact. Things are a little slow at Glass Character, Inc., so I thought I'd try to dredge up something really weird.

It didn't take me long.

I don't know where I first saw the image of the glass globule, ampule, or whatever it's called - and at first I thought it was a Christmas ornament! The thought of slimy, multi-legged creatures squirming around inside a Christmas bauble was pretty nauseating, considering the life of such a creature when enclosed in an airless glass bauble. Pretty soon they wouldn't even be moving.

You were supposed to wear this pendant to school (I guess) to impress your friends. It was only a buck, which shows you just how long ago all this happened. It was real back-of-the-comic-book stuff, and next to Onion Gum, represents my favorite ad of all time.

Though I detest like crazy transcribing copy from ads, in this case I simply had to. So for you, my pleasant and loyal readers, I'll tell you exactly what it says here!

WEAR AMAZING LIVE PETS IN THE LIVING SEA-GEM TM

A FASCINATING SEAQUARIUM ON A GOLDEN CHAIN!

Just THINK! Adorable LIVE Sea-Monkeys, world's NEWEST, most LOVEABLE mini-pets, romp within a sparkling crystal pendant that hangs suspended from a chain of GOLD! In REALITY, the pendant is an AUTHENTIC SEAQUARIUM in MINIATURE, filled with the SAME kind of foam speckled sea-water that laps against dreamy tropical island shores! Inside this sheltered glass lagoon, LIVE, bright-eyed Sea-Monkeys splash and frolic like happy natives! Picture the SURPRISE when your FRIENDS see them!

RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES - INSTANT LIFE!

Sea-Monkeys are nature's GREATEST MIRACLE because they LIVE up to 100 YEARS in unhatched eggs! With your Sea-Gem you receive a LARGE supply of these PRECIOUS eggs! Pour them into a fishbowl of water, and BEFORE YOUR EYES, Sea-Monkeys by the DOZENS are BORN ALIVE! 

These AMAZING Sea-Monkeys are even MORE fun to own than a Zoo FULL of chattering, leaping JUNGLE MONKEYS! AND, it's EASY to TRAIN them! At your silent COMMAND they will learn to follow a light beam anywhere YOU wish - turn SOMERSAULTS, and OBEDIENTLY Loop-The-Loop! 

Each has it's (sic) OWN "personality" so put your favorites in the pendant to "show off" when you go out! Some BELIEVE they even BRING GOOD LUCK, and NO DOUBT, they ARE the BEST "conversation makers" EVER! For Sea-Monkeys AND The Living Sea-Gem, complete with beautiful 18" golden metal-link neckchain, clasp, hand-wrought golden filigree cap and glass Seaquarium ball that sparkles like a diamond even in the FAINTEST light, send ONLY $1.00 plus 50 cents postage.

FREE BONUS! I dredged up something even worse, from quite a long time ago. Sea monkeys deserve more than one post, and must be reflected upon every couple of years, in case my opinion of them has changed.

It has not.

OH, oh, oh, oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhh. . . did I ever just find something neat! 

There's ANOTHER Sea Gem ad, I don't know where it's from but it looks sort of British. It looks more up-to-date except the price is the same. 

I've heard of buying sea monkey kits in dollar stores, so who knows. Though it may not have been "as pictured", this one sure looks a lot nicer than the other necklace - if you ignore the hideous "thing" inside it. This could not have been a selling point! For one thing, there's only ONE Of them in there. It looks even uglier than a real sea monkey, if that's even possible. And the glass thingie is only 1-1/2", not exactly aquarium-sized unless you're a micro-organism from another planet.

Where do they get those eggs? Can you do that with semen, do you think? Is that what they do in those labs, instead of freezing it? Could you just, like, go down to the store and buy dried sperm like you'd buy a package of Kool-Aid?

And what about tardigrades? 

These ads raise more questions than they answer.

Oh, and. One more. Can't find where this came from. . . 

And oh my God. The next day.

This is a total enigma. As usual, there's no information about these images at all, just a brief paragraph about how disappointing they were on one of these "retro" blogs that lasts about eighteen months before the blogger runs out of ideas.

But from the open-box display, it honestly looks as if someone HAS one of these necklaces! Perhaps they can be found on eBay or Craigslist, but I feel a bit of reluctance to start digging. (Oh, I probably will.) 

The thing I notice about the last two ads, besides the classic '60s Petula Clark/Cilla Black-ish hairdos, is the fact that they mention just ONE sea monkey, whereas the first ad refers to multiple sea monkeys and picking out your favourites according to "personality". Could it be the first idea failed when the creatures quickly ran out of oxygen/food and started eating each other? Or did this favouritism quickly lead to bitter envy among the sea monkey community, leading to a highly-organized multi-legged coup d'etat?

Dusty Springfield

Priscilla Presley

Unknown

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Mocking - and kind of shocking

(I don't usually post journal entries here, but this one was so strange that I wanted to, for reasons unknown. These are among the less-bizarre dreams that I have, though they're kind of shocking. The strangest was when I was going to a train station to meet myself.)

Had really horrible dreams all night, turbulent. Don’t know why this happens sometimes. Sometimes they involve my sister. This time they were completely bizarre. I only remember one vividly. I was upstairs in a house or apartment (not a familiar one) and heard loud, maniacal laughter, just cackling in a way that sounded unhinged. I went downstairs and saw my sister watching TV, and an opera singer was performing, a young woman lying down. She had a lovely voice. 

My sister was very loudly, raucously mocking her with this laughter. It was so completely over the top. I told her, “Listen, this woman has a beautiful voice.” The mocking was obviously my sister's way to obscure and deny her complete inability to risk anything (as a singer) by disdaining and showing contempt for everyone else's efforts, a chronic pattern with her. When I confronted her she seemed to back down, or at least I thought she did. In another scene we were physically fighting, as we often do in my dreams (but never in life). Sometimes I even wish I could kill her.

I had a whole lot more dreams – oh! I was making something for my daughter Shannon out of a huge cardboard box and polyester stuffing, and I was going to make (probably knit) a sort of grey skin for it – an elephant, but then it turned into a whale. I was partly done making it, but needed another bag of stuffing (or ten!), then left it in my old church – sort of, it didn’t look like my old church, but a person I knew was there, or someone sort of like her. I thought my work in progress would be safe there. 

Then when I came back, they had thrown the box out and then pretended to be sorry. They said they didn't recognize it and thought it was garbage. I was angry and devastated that they had just thrown it away and sure that they had done it deliberately. I know there were other dreams, one about a restaurant serving sandwiches that at first seemed good but later turned out to be horrible and slimy, but it was sort of disgusting. Bill was involved with this one, but as with most dreams it has melted into vapour and disappeared. 

I doubt if these things mean very much except to represent feelings about a person or an institution. I remember trying to fashion some sort of tail for the whale.

Normally I don’t remember dreams, and that’s fine with me.

Why men shouldn't write advice columns

And now let's play. . . LEGAL/ILLEGAL!

Do I really need to say much about these? I suppose people have been killed by plastic lawn darts, but it would take an awful lot of will (or an awful lot of darts).

What a friend we have in cheeses! Some wag on Facebook suggested that all the holes in the Gruyere were made by unlicensed weapons. Then again. . . "my gun license is the Second Amendment!" Whoever wrote it must be kind of old by now. But wasn't that made for, uh, um, muskets and such-like, that used powder horns and took 5 minutes to re-load?

Right, but those Kinder Surprise eggs can really be dangerous! Someone once stepped on one of those plastic toys.

This is just one of those "things" that is preaching to the choir. No NRA member ever sat down and said, "Hmmmmm - what would happen if guns were s regulated as cars?" Then again, these yahoos might take this as a good reason NOT to regulate guns. Jesus Christ, man - you mean to say I'm supposed to take driver training? Isn't that against my Constitutional rights?

I had a truly sickening thought and did not want to follow up on it, but then I thought of something else and HAD to. This old Kinder Surprise ad is one of the creepiest things ever made. I made several gifs of it, none of which I liked. I hated this one the least.

I only posted it because I wanted to compare/contrast it with something from the 1934 version of Alice in Wonderland. This is W. C. Fields playing Humpty Dumpty.

And then of course I got onto all the old film versions of Alice, including the very first one - made in 1904 - which is so damaged it's virtually unwatchable. Too bad, because I really do love lots of mess and scrabbles on my film - I've made whole gifs of nothing but visual "noise". This is a little extreme however, and the constant splashing pulsations are very distracting, like acid being rhythmically thrown in your face. What I like about it is the fact that the Cheshire Cat is just an ordinary house cat, sitting contentedly on some sort of elevated platform. 

This version came out in 1915, and the animal costumes are a bit more plausible, but no less creepy. I love the moment just before the Cheshire Cat disappears - those staring eyes remind me of  Louis Wain cats. Reflects the nightmarish, unchildlike quality of the original story. One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.

My new drag queen name

You know how it goes. That thing.

That thing we used to do, remember, where you take the name of your first pet and the name of the street you grew up on? Trouble is, a lot of people grew up on streets that were numbered, which did not sound very drag-queenish.

Some people's PETS might be numbered, too - Uno comes to mind, and he did OK with that handle. But in any case, mine came out pretty good: Skippy Victoria, which has just the right note of androgyny, and a sassyness contrasting nicely with Victorian propriety.

Pretty hot stuff.

(I'm working up to it, I'm working up to it!) Tonight I got thinking about obsolete products, things that were wildly popular just for a little while, and how lame and ridiculous they seem now. As I always do when curious or perplexed, I turned to YouTube, and voila - 

I found the original ad for something that took the pop-guzzling world by storm in the early '90s, before plummeting into permanent oblivion.

The ad, a true classic of obnoxious inspiration, seems to hammer away at a couple of key concepts: how naturalness is preferable to artificiality (? Can't say it any other way), how individuality is crucial in a world that would flatten our unique contributions, about how there's a new world a-coming which is going to blow everybody's socks off, but NOT through technology (because back then in 1992 technology WASN'T the omnipresent monster it is today, though ironically it was still seen as a monster), and. . .

And: RIGHT NOW. Right now, right now, right now, right now, right now.

Yes. Here it is, as exquisite and perfect as the Mona Lisa, every Madison Avenue copy boy's wet dream:

 CRYSTAL PEPSI.

And here at last is the point of this entire inane, silly post: this is my NEW drag queen name! I think Crystal Pepsi is far superior to Skippy Victoria. She's my old, haggard, slatternly drag queen persona, and Crystal Pepsi is my new, wink-y, soft-drink-y, bubbly, clearly crystalline persona, one of those "natural" drag queens that doesn't really wear any makeup or high heels or prosthetics.

Hey, what do you mean they don't exist? Fine name, though.

No guns, no shootings: are you crazy?

I just posted a Facebook comment, and how I wish I hadn't, in response to another comment, and how I wish I hadn't read it, by a guy who was blustering on and on about the Second Amendment and Constitutional Rights, etc. etc. so you knew where he was coming from without asking, and he says at one point, in all-caps of course, SO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT YOU THINK IF ALL GUN OWNERS SURRENDERED ALL THEIR WEAPONS, THERE WOULD BE NO MORE MASS SHOOTINGS?

I answered, well, uh, sir, um. Uh, YEAH, that's the way it would be; if there were no guns, there'd be no shootings. Eh?

"What, what, what," I can hear him (and others of his ilk) spluttering. "That's - that's impossible. That wouldn't change anything! It would just infringe on our Constitutional rights!"

But it would. It would change everything. 

Even though to many, many people, being without guns is unthinkable, it's thinkable. It is. People just haven't realized it yet.

There was a time when most Americans believed slavery was acceptable, if not desirable and/or an innate right. Then things began to change. Certain people began to speak out, people who saw it as an innate wrong. 

Sometimes, when the time is ripe, history lifts up the right leader. So along came that cat named Abraham Lincoln. And then a funny thing happened.

After a long and incredibly bloody war, during which one whole side wouldn't let go of their entrenched ideology and/or their weaponry, - POOF - or (bang!) - slavery was no longer acceptable.

In fact -

In fact, slavery no longer existed. All the slaves were set free. All of them. At once.

That doesn't mean all the problems were solved, but the problems changed. Those former slaves needed/deserved to build decent lives for themselves, with the same rights and privileges as everyone else. The transition was so rocky that some people think it's still being made to this day.

Am I making my point here? Slavery was acceptable - just a given. Could you do anything about it? Of course not. The commerce of an entire country was built on the backs of slaves, so why would anyone want to?

Then someone wanted to. Then a lot of someones.

Then slavery was unacceptable. Then a war was fought, and when the dust settled, it no longer existed. 

New ideas or good ideas or shit-disturbing/revolutionary/incredibly simple and powerful ideas always start off as impossible/impractical or even insane ideas and have to be shouted down. Hey, we can't do that! YOU can't do that! It's - it's, well - we've just never done it that way! Or: it's immoral, or: God doesn't like it. Or it violates my Constitutional rights.

We can't get rid of all the guns!

Then we'd have no guns. NO GUNS? 

(But that doesn't mean we'd have no shootings. Does it?)

Uhmmmm. 

Yes.

Afterthought. I like to tack on things I couldn't work into the main body of my post. I'm not sure how to say this one, but it's been rolling around in my head all day, and even before that - ever since the latest carnage/atrocity that destroyed dozens of valuable, irreplaceable human lives.

There's a lot of talk about the Constitution and the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, etc., when the wording of the original statement seems so irrelevant to me that I have to twist it into a pretzel before it means anything at all.

But with all this talk of rights and freedoms, what about my right, your right, OUR right to peace of mind? What about being able to go to school or church or a night club without fear of being shot to death? We're beginning to think of these horrors as a fundamental fact of life, something we can't do anything about.

When that happens, we stop trying for anything better.

I have a right, you have a right, they have a right. WE ALL have a right to not have to worry about our kids and grandkids being killed, their future stopped. I remember a time, and it was not so long ago, when these things simply did not happen, when mass murder was so rare as to be almost unheard-of. There was no familiar pattern of groaning and sighing every few months: "oh God, not another one," and waiting to find out the sickening circumstances.

People are starting to act as if nothing can be done.

If they think nothing can be done, nothing can be done.

A gun can be picked up. A gun can be put down. It can be surrendered; confiscated; thrown away. The ammunition can be pulled out of it forever.

No guns = no shootings. Too simple; it can't be so. But how could it be anything but true?

At arm's length from the carnage

I supported gun control in Canada since the 1980s with regular donations that were withdrawn from my bank account. During a couple of decades, in some groups, I dared not admit this bec. 'we're entitled to guns' mentality. I hope my small part along with that of many others, has helped keep Canada at arm's length from the carnage shootings happening with our neighbours. Prayers are not enough - clear action will work better. and soon!!

OK, maybe they mean well, but Americans are speaking a different language here, and it's based on what they know about themselves (and nothing more).

The above is an actual Facebook comment from an American, not a "friend" but someone commenting on somebody else's post. It indicates she thinks Canada has a passionate anti-gun lobby that has worked, and worked, and worked like mad over many decades to keep guns under control and keep them from getting into the hands of its citizens.

What?!

There's no anti-gun lobby in Canada. That's like saying we have to lobby like mad to grow maple trees. There's no gun control. We don't have guns. 

I'm not saying there are NO guns in Canada. Cops have them. Sportsmen have them, though the regulations are extremely stringent. Aboriginal people living in the North need them to hunt for their meals.

Um, people.

I don't see, nor do I hear, nor have I ever in my lifetime heard anyone jumping up and down with signs in Canada saying, "NO! GUNS! NO! GUNS! NO! GUNS!" I don't hear any politicians giving impassioned speeches about everyone putting down their weapons.

Nor do I hear anyone thanking the Americans from the bottom of their hearts for saving us from the scourge of guns with their generous donations.  I honestly don't know what she is talking about, though I guess her heart is in the right place for having those anti-gun sentiments. And her money must have gone somewhere. The Let's Make Sure We Don't Change Our Minds About Guns campaign?

But the plain truth is, we don't need American money (or even our own) to keep us on the brink of the precipice. We don't "think" gun, own gun, rave about gun. Gangs have them, but they're GANGS, ladies and gentlemen, gangsters, criminals! Every country in the world has criminals.

When I hear about some woman on a show like Dateline saying, "I heard something downstairs, so I grabbed my gun. . .", the gulf just widens.

My gun.

Where is "my" gun? WHAT gun?

We don't speak gun.

DISARM

"We are the Champions": Cardinals WIN THE SERIES!

 

And Ryan played so well! His skills have just grown by leaps and bounds this season. Grandma and Grandpa attended the final playoff game and cheered themselves hoarse. He poses with a very proud Dad and Mom, and a cherished trophy and cup.

WAY TO GO, RYAN! GO CARDINALS!!!

Orlando: a total disconnect

I am trying to get my mind off this, because I just got home from a terrific Little League game in which my grandson's team SMOKED the competition and won the trophy. I guess I shouldn't have watched the Dateline I recorded from last night, because the scheduled show had been pre-empted by coverage of what happened in Orlando. 

The show had been thrown together in a hurry and the seams showed, but what really irritated me was the utter, total bafflement and bewilderment everyone expressed at the "causes" of all these mass shootings (not just terrorist-related ones, but ALL of them - the whole litany of them, they kept going over and over them, even showing little flags stuck on maps).

Everyone talked around and around the issue, and there was a lot of hand-wringing as well as a lot of bombast about holding our heads high and not being afraid of evil, etc. etc. (and subtle, though denied fingerpointing at Muslims), but NOT ONCE did ANYONE mention gun control and the fact weapons are so unregulated and ridiculously easy to attain in the USA. They kept droning on and on about America's atrocious record regarding mass shootings, but STILL did not make the connection to lack of regulation of firearms and a "gun mentality" based on the ludicrous notion of a "second amendment". In fact it was a complete and total disconnect. 

What do mass shootings have to do with gun control? Those concerns are for the PBS crowd - rarefied intellectuals who don't know enough to keep a gun in their bureau drawer (and another one in the closet, and another one in the refrigerator, and a few out in the garage and in the basement) for "home defense" and "security". Those concerns are for people who are basically out of touch with reality. The only way to fight gunfire is with gunfire! If all those people in the nightclub had been armed, by God. . . 

I don't know how it is for the average American, if there is such a thing, but I have to tell you that I don't think I have ever seen a gun, not in person. I've certainly never touched one, and the only person I've ever known who owned guns collected antique rifles that he never fired. Thus, to me, a Canadian, guns should be relatively invisible. 

But it's the other way around.

By the end of the Dateline special my head was spinning around and around. Their mentality existed across a very deep, wide gulf of misunderstanding - in fact, a yawning chasm - and these were *news* people, seasoned reporters like Keith Morrison and Tom Brokaw, and terrorism experts who have even written books about the subject (and thus know everything about it). I swear to you, they looked directly at the problem, stared it right in the face, and didn't see it.

How many fucking enemies do you have? (and other questions to ask yourself)

A few quotes from Australian comedian Jim Jefferies. (Are you sure you're not from Canada?)

In Australia, we had the biggest massacre on earth, and the Australian government went: "That's it! NO MORE GUNS." And we all went, "Yeah, all right then, that seems fair enough, really."

Now in America, you had the Sandy Hook massacre, where little tiny children died. And your government went, "Maybe … we'll get rid of the big guns?" And 50 percent of you went, "FUCK YOU, DON'T TAKE MY GUNS."

He hammers home the idea that Americans keep guns just because they enjoy them, not because they seriously think they can protect themselves:

You have guns because you like guns! That's why you go to gun conventions; that's why you read gun magazines! None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door.

And Jefferies also notes that the underlying mentality behind American gun culture, that people are always out to get you, is utterly bizarre:

By the way. Most people who are breaking into your house just want your fucking TV! You think that people are coming to murder your family? How many fucking enemies do you have?