Cute kitten gifs: The Great Escape

America my friend

And so once again,

My dear Johnny, my dear friend,

And so once again you are fighting us all,

And when I ask you why,

You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall,

Oh, my friend,

How did you come

To trade the fiddle for the drum,

You say I have turned,

Like the enemies you've earned,

But I can remember,

All the good things you are,

And so I ask you please,

Can I help you find the peace and the star,

Oh, my friend,

What time is this

To trade the handshake for the fist

And so once again,

Oh, America my friend,

And so once again,

You are fighting us all,

And when we ask you why,

You raise your sticks and cry and we fall,

Oh, my friend,

How did you come,

To trade the fiddle for the drum

You say we have turned,

Like the enemies you've earned,

But we can remember,

All the good things you are,

And so we ask you please,

Can we help you find the peace and the star,

Oh my friend,

We have all come,

To fear the beating of your drum

Joni Mitchell

Eegah (1962) Trailer

Every cat has his day: Browser's triumphant return

Library Cat's Job Is Saved

July 2, 2016 12:43 AM ET

Barbara Campbell

How could you evict that little face? Browser the public library cat has been reprieved and will stay on the job in White Settlement, Texas. Here, he sits among a group of children being read to. John L. Mone/AP


Why the city council of White Settlement, Texas, decided to fire Browser, mascot and rodent hunter of the public library is not clear, but the vote two weeks ago was 2-1 to banish Browser. Friday, under an avalanche of complaints, the council members decided unanimously that Browser could stay.

Browser got his job six years ago when the library had a problem with rodents. By all accounts, he was a big success and nestled into library-goers hearts.

The Dallas Morning News elaborates on Browser's job:

"Like most felines, Browser spends a good deal of time napping, lounging and sneaking out the door — but he also attends the library's GED classes and has an honorary diploma, the library says. And each year, the library sells a calendar full of pictures of Browser as a fundraiser."

Then one day, reports the Fort Worth Star-Tribune:

"Declaring that 'City Hall and city businesses are no place for animals,' Councilman Elzie Clements led what Browser's fans call a sneak attack ...

"The agenda item was listed only as 'consider relocation of Library Facility cat.'"

Council member Steve Ott is quoted as expressing concern about people who might be allergic to cat dander. As Mayor Ron White tells it, according to the Associated Press, the cat was targeted in retaliation when a city worker was denied permission to bring a puppy to city hall.

Browser's supporters began a petition drive, and of course the Internet got involved, and more than 1,000 messages from around the world later, the council voted again unanimously to keep Browser.

He'll probably issue a statement of thanks to his supporters at some point but at the moment, his Facebook page isn't available.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/02/484111751/library-cats-job-is-saved

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Cover your eyes: it's Equus

I made the mistake of watching Equus last night, the whole thing this time. I’ve bailed on it at least once, and I should have bailed on it again: it's heavy, dark, oppressive, and totally sickening at the end. In essence, it's one long monologue by Dr. Martin Dysart (played by a pockmarked, dead-eyed Richard Burton), a disaffected child psychiatrist who treats an adolescent boy (Alan Strang) who has blinded six horses for no reason anyone can determine.

The original Broadway play does NOT “show” the horses being blinded, but dramatizes and narrates it, which would be much more effective. Even Roger Ebert in his review from 1977 said he could not watch that part, and I even had to mute the sound. I didn’t like the boy at all – didn’t even care about him, dull, snotty-nosed kid without a single thought in his head. I soon became bored with all his self-created travails. 

And what was it about – how horrifying sex is? How religion destroys sex, how religion is sublimates sex – WHAT? Some say it was about, gasp, horrors, homosexuality, which might still have had some punch as a forbidden topic back in 1973 when it was first staged. Analysts to the stars like Mildred Newman (How to Be Your Own Best Friend, a bestselling masterwork of psychobabble) were still trying to "cure" it :"We've heard all kinds of success stories", she claimed, probably referring to Tony Perkins who later died of AIDS. But such sexual "deviancy", as it was known then, has no punch left in it now.

In the film version, Richard Burton is impossible to engage with. The many extreme closeups of his face are like a lunar landing, deeply pitted and utterly cold. On Broadway, the part was originated by Anthony Hopkins (who would have handled it better, though he’s still pretty stony), followed by Anthony Perkins, Leonard Nimoy, and maybe one other underappreciated Hollywood has-been.  Along with that snotty-nosed git of a boy,  I found it similarly hard to care about Burton’s character. In a rut? DO something about it, for God’s sake – have an affair with a girl or a boy or a PATIENT even. Get arrested! It would at least be a change of scene, wouldn’t it? No kaopectate needed. That reference gave me a good laugh, but it was the only time I actually felt something.

Maybe it’s a period piece, I don’t know – after all, this is Peter Shaffer, who wrote Amadeus, and that was a very long time ago. But the lines are just too flowery for normal speech – nobody talks that way or even thinks that way. (And we all know that going on and on about Greek mythology means you're actually a flaming poof.) It was self-consciously “beautiful”, verbal fireworks, real oooh and ahhh stuff, which I despise. Oh my God, how moving! Oh my God, how powerful! Makes me sick. How I hate writing that calls attention to itself.

It's a cheap trick. 

Anyway, I was going to bail at several points, and should have. Or keep it for another day, which means never - I would have deleted it. Then I kept looking at the time left and looked up the length in my movie book (TCM leaves 20 minutes or so between movies for endless fawning over 95-year-old legends of the screen). I had half an hour left and trudged through it, literally covering my eyes when the blinding scene came, and muting it. I refused to watch or listen. Now I still feel a little bit sick and have a hangover or aftertaste which is pretty awful. Is that “art”? Art is supposed to unsettle as well as entertain, but I'm not sure it's supposed to unsettle your stomach to this degree.

A little backnote. I remember, ages ago, reading (or reading parts of - it was essentially unreadable) an attack on Hollywood by former producer Julia Phillips, who managed to devastate/alienate everyone in her path. It was called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, a good description of her own self-created fate.

I only mention it here because it talked about her relationship with Tony and Berry Perkins. She attended a performance of Equus on Broadway with the couple, starring I'm-not-sure-who (but I think it was Hopkins, the originator of the part), and said that when Tony embraced her he "felt her up": "highschoolhighschoolhighschool," she commented, later pronouncing Equus "a crock of faggot shit".

BTW, "Lunch" (as it became known) was considered career suicide for a woman who often inspired the urge for homicide amongst her cohorts. This is an excerpt from a surprisingly long Wikipedia entry:

On its release most critics agreed that the book was both scandalous and career-ending. (Even with a quarter of the 1,000-page original manuscript excised, it took lawyers at Random House fourteen months to approve it for publication. Lewis Cole, in The Nation, described it as being "[not] written but spat out, a breakneck, formless performance piece...propelled by spite and vanity".Newsweek's review called it a "573-page primal scream", while one Hollywood producer said it was "the longest suicide note in history".In the 2003 documentary version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, based on Peter Biskind's 1998 anecdotal history of New Hollywood, Richard Dreyfuss recalled his initial fury at Phillips' revelations, before more circumspectly listening to "a little voice inside my head [saying] 'Richard, Richard, the truth was so much worse'." Despite Phillips' criticisms of Steven Spielberg in the book, Spielberg nevertheless invited her to a 1997 screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a way of "keeping his friends close and his enemies closer."

The "career-ending" thing is a little ambiguous. Do they mean HER career, or the careers of those people she so savagely, publicly eviscerated? Why did she hate everybody so much? If the book was so suicidal, why is 85% of the Wiki entry dedicated to it? Why is she remembered far more for the memoir than for anything else? I also have a sneaking suspicion that people would be far more upset if they were left out of the book. Nothing is more devastating than being ignored by Julia Phillips.

Her feud with Erica Jong was legendary, and there are quite long passages in Lunch where she trashes her. Erica gets her revenge in more than one of her books, depicting her as a ball-crushing, narcissistic bitch in one of her novels (the one after Fear of Flying, whatever it's called) and having another go at her in one of her memoirs, insisting the two of them kissed and made up while Phillips was in the death-throes of cancer. In this scenario, Phillips apologized to her profusely - but we'll never know what really happened. Let's not forget that Jong primarily writes fiction.

With such a histrionic cast, it's all pretty good theatre, I'd say. Much better than the psychological clinker that is Equus. It's a bummer, folks. If you do watch it, fast-forward over the horse-blinding part. Or just put your hands over your eyes.

Post-thoughts. This is a tiny clip of Daniel Radcliffe's go at Alan Strang. I wish it were longer. I do like the idea of stylized, abstract human/horse figures, as it both takes away from the horror of watching actual horses have their eyes gouged out, and brings the horse/boy relationship uncomfortably close. These creatures are like centaurs in reverse. Not half-horse and half-human, but mostly human with a horse's head and impulse-driven brain.  Sublimely beautiful, yet grotesque. Just the way the actor shakes the horse's head is eerily natural. I guess Equus was just one of those stage plays that got lost in translation.

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She's a wildcat! Or maybe. . . she just can't poop

"Watch your step" he said. . . SHE'S A WILDCAT!

What a penalty people pay for being mean and nasty-tempered! They forfeit friends and romance! They're their own worst enemies!

Still, they're not always to blame. You know, yourself, that you can't escape being nervous, irritable, crabby, if your system is clogged with poisonous wastes. So if you really want to be light-hearted. . . popular, fresh-looking. . . be sure that your bowels move regularly. And whenever Nature needs help - take Ex-Lax.

Ex-Lax works by the "GENTLE NUDGE" system

The "gentle nudge" system is a simple, easy, effective method of giving you a thorough cleaning-out. Ex-Lax just gives your intestines a gentle nudge at the point where constipation exists. Evacuation is easy, comfortable - and complete. You'll feel clean. You'll feel more alive. And you'll be grateful for the absence of the strain and nausea that make the action of a harsh purgative so unpleasant.

Another thing - Ex-Lax tastes just like delicious chocolate. Children actually enjoy taking it, and Ex-Lax is just as good for them as it is for you. Available at all drug stores in 10-cent and 25-cent sizes.

When Nature forgets - remember EX-LAX The Original Chocolated Laxative

The Kojak paper doll and other '60s artifacts

Seldom do I find something this exquisite on the internet. A Telly Savalas paper doll! I especially love the yellow cargo pants (he was ahead of his time) and the striped shirt with the "whatever" at the front. At first I thought it was a tie, but I think not. It's one of those lace-up things.

This, of course, got me on a Thing. Celebrity paper dolls, but boy dolls. I remembered this bashful Tony Perkins pose with the pink polka-dot briefs and the upside-down turquoise trench coat. The text on these is in some sort of foreign language, Swedish I think, so I won't try to translate.

Though the name is cut off at the bottom (and crappy cropping is one of the things I hate MOST about Pinterest), this is Micky Dolenz of The Monkees. Really, he's nicely turned-out here, though I do wonder at the difficulty of snipping out all those little tabs. As I recall from girlhood, when I used to try to actually do these things, the scissors would always slip, causing almost all the tabs to be sliced off. Then you had to sort of tape the clothes on, defeating the purpose of the thing.

Here you can play with your Monkee all you want. Mike Nesmith being the coolest.

This is kind of a nice Elvis layout. Too many tabs by half, however. In some cases you were supposed to glue the paper onto stiff cardboard, let it dry, and THEN cut it out. Maybe then it could stand alone?

Prince Charles! I didn't know he existed as a paper doll. (Can Prince Harry be far behind?) Note that you put one set of clothes on top of the other. I guess they believed having a Prince in his gotchies would be a bit unsuitable.

There's something a bit dodgy about this Steve Austin doll. The head definitely does not belong to the body. I think this is probably a generic doll with interchangeable heads. It would help if they could get the size right.

My personal favorite: the Hoss Cartwright paper doll, complete with ten-gallon hat, though I don't see his Colt 45 anywhere. But the more I think about it - Dan Blocker in his underwear - uh - um - gghhgh - excuse me.

Never-ending story

Yowie-wowie!: Bigfoot down under

Yowie is one of several names given to a hominid reputed to live in the Australian wilderness. The creature has its roots in Aboriginal oral history. In parts of Queensland, they are known as. . . 

quinkin (or as a type of quinkin), and as

joogabinna, in parts of New South Wales they are called

jurrawarra,

myngawin,

puttikan,

gubba,

doolaga,

gulaga and

thoolagal. Other names include

yahoo,

yaroma,

noocoonah,

wawee,

pangkarlangu,

jimbra and

tjangara.

(Gifs courtesy of a jerky company called Jack Links. Go figure.)

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Hello, blackbirds!

Another magic moment at Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake. Most of the birds have gone "elsewhere", for some reason (the Canada Day long weekend?), which was a big disappointment. I didn't get to see my gorgeous, majestic sandhill cranes, no wood ducks, no ducklings or goslings, etc. But the blackbirds were out in force, and hungrier than ever. Now that I know I am permitted by the Park Board to feed the birds off the pier, I feel I can do so with a clear conscience. And here they are!

"Awwwwww "moment of the day